The syndicated columnist Dan Savage has been dropped by the Salt Lake Weekly for his support of a Utah boycott.
Salt Lake Weekly Fires Dan Savage for Utah Boycott; Voice Protests
Posted by Roy Edroso
People outraged at Mormon support of California's anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 have started boycotting Utah, home of Prop-8-financing Mormons. Now Utahns are striking back: The Salt Lake City Weekly is dropping sex columnist and fierce Prop-8 opponent Dan Savage.
The Weekly is mad that the popular syndicated author has flipped off the Beehive State and announced he and his boyfriend won't be vacationing there ("Fuck you, Utah -- we’re going to big, blue Colorado").
The Weekly says "all Utahns aren’t to blame," points out that noxious gay-hater James Dobson runs his Focus on the Family Forum in Colorado, and says Savage should, for the good of his cause, spend more rather than less time in Utah -- "Imagine Martin Luther King Jr. not marching in Selma" -- before announcing that "If you're a fan of Savage's column, you won't find it on our Website any longer... there's no point in us playing in his sandbox by sending him a regular check."
More from the Village Voice:
Runnin' Scared and the Voice are astonished that the paper would defenestrate Savage on the basis of his views -- especially when those views are entirely predictable from the tenor of his previous work. (Did they actually expect Savage to be gentle about a major gay-rights issue?) We can't think of another alt-weekly that would do such a thing and, till this happened, never expected it of the Weekly. The Voice retains the services of Nat Hentoff, an out-and-proud abortion rights opponent, even though nearly everyone on our editorial staff is ferociously pro-choice. And though Runnin' Scared itself has advocated arboricide and rodenticide, we have not been dismissed to spare the feelings of our tree-hugging, PETA-supporting readers, management or advertisers. That will come later, when they see our expense reports.
We protest the Weekly's decision and stand with Dan Savage, and offer to replace the Weekly on his client list if he will accept cereal boxtops and drink tickets as payment.
==more at link==
From Savage's column in support of the boycott:
==snip==
The Mormon church put up four out of every five dollars spent to ban same-sex marriage in California. More than 18,000 legally married couples in California were forcibly divorced on Tuesday thanks to the members of a church founded by a polygamist and a pedophile with more than a dozen wives. Since all Mormons-in-good-standing must tithe 10% of their earnings to their church, some part of any dollar you spend in a Mormon-owned business—and they’re almost all Mormon-owned businesses in Utah—flows toward an anti-gay church that wages anti-gay political campaigns. Ski Colorado, Washington state, and British Columbia. Don’t ski Utah.
Honest to God: My boyfriend and I were talking about taking a trip to Utah this winter to go snowboarding. We’ve heard great things about the resorts there, and our kid wants to go, and we’ve never been. But you know what? We’ve never been to Whistler either. Or Bear Mountain in California. Or to any of the resorts in Colorado. So fuck you, Utah—we’re going to big, blue Colorado.
Oh, and the leaders of the Mormon church—which financed all the bigoted distortions of the "Yes on 8" campaign (gay people recruit children! they’re going to teach gay sex in schools!)—are out there calling on people to treat each the with "civility, with respect and with love." Uh-huh.
A story about the boycott from the San Jose Mercury News.
SALT LAKE CITY—Utah's growing tourism industry and the star-studded Sundance Film Festival are being targeted for a boycott by bloggers, gay rights activists and others seeking to punish the Mormon church for its aggressive promotion of California's ban on gay marriage.
It could be a heavy price to pay. Tourism brings in $6 billion a year to Utah, with world-class skiing, a spectacular red rock country and the film festival founded by Robert Redford, among other popular tourist draws.
"At a fundamental level, the Utah Mormons crossed the line on this one," said gay rights activist John Aravosis, an influential blogger in Washington, D.C.
==snip==
Church spokeswoman Kim Farah said in a statement about the temple protests Friday that it is "disturbing" that the church is being singled out for exercising its right to speak up in a free election.
"While those who disagree with our position on Proposition 8 have the right to make their feelings known, it is wrong to target the Church and its sacred places of worship for being part of the democratic process," Farah said.
So an outspoken columnist is silenced in Utah. Who's next?
**UPDATE** Thanks to cadejo4 for video of Dan Savage's appearance on CNN last night: