Members of Cheyenne Central’s Gay-Straight Alliance recently
met with state senator Lynn Hutchings to advocate for an anti-discrimination
proposal. Instead of the respect constituents deserve from elected officials,
these young people were greeted with a foul expression of hatred.
According to a complaint filed by Wyoming Equality, Senator
Hutchings told the young audience, “If
my sexual orientation was to have sex with all of the men in there and I had
sex with all of the women in there and then they brought their children and I
had sex with all of them and then brought their dogs in and I had sex with
them, should I be protected for my sexual orientation?”
Hutchings called that “an attempt at a meaningful dialogue.”
Others call it a reason for her to resign. Little good that would do. Her odious
views square with the Republican Party under the tight-fisted control of a
chairman who founded the thankfully-deceased WyWatch, the most intolerant extremist
group in Wyoming since the last days of the KKK’s presence in the Equality
State.
Certainly she’s not fit to be a public servant. But, she
didn’t elect herself. Only the voters of Senate District 5 can atone for their
tainted decision. Beyond that, many of her legislative colleagues share her
dogma. They endorsed her conduct by rejecting rules protecting the LGBTQ
community from harassment perpetrated by lawmakers.
Forcing one of the legislature’s homophobes to resign would
be like dredging a bucket of water from the ocean in an effort to drain it.
From the time the students who Ms. Hutchings accosted were
in elementary school, they were misled, taught that Wyoming is the Equality
State. They learned Wyoming was the first state to give women the right to vote
and that Wyoming elected the first woman governor in the nation.
Those things are the truth but not the whole truth. These
kids learned something closer to the whole truth in their unpleasant encounter
with their state senator, a hard but important lesson, learned at an early age.
These young men and women now know what the Equality State is really like for
cultural, racial, and religious minorities.
Anger about this incident turns to sadness when you
recognize that dark cloud hanging over Wyoming. For some, it’s a cloud of
hopelessness. That cloud was there from the start, hanging low, casting shadows
in the shape of bigotry.
Senator Hutchings wasn’t the first. She isn’t even the worst.
There were others like her before her. Those who pioneered her mindset
destroyed Native American culture on the Great Plains. They lynched Wyoming blacks
at a per capita rate exceeding that of Mississippi, massacred Chinese workers
in Rock Springs, and attacked Jehovah’s Witnesses in Rawlins.
They attempted a McCarthy-era purge of textbooks at the
University of Wyoming and imprisoned Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain. Without
people who thought like Ms. Hutchings, wicked politicians could never have
blackmailed Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt into committing suicide.
They carried confederate flags into War Memorial Stadium to
taunt fourteen black football players the day after an intolerant coach
terminated their education because they asked to protest the then-racist
policies of the LDS Church. They murdered Matt Shepard and then tried to erase the
crime by revising the history of that atrocity.
They continue propagating prejudice, seeking to build a
prison to inhumanely warehouse hundreds of undocumented persons whose only
crime is seeking better lives for their children. They are proud Wyoming is one
of four states refusing to pass hate-crimes laws, satisfied theirs is the only
state in the union unwilling to enter into a refugee resettlement agreement
with the U.S. Government.
They smile and nod their heads as Donald Trump says there are
“good people on both sides.” They continue working to make sure that whatever seeds
of tolerance and love are scattered elsewhere, they will not find fertile soil here.
That cloud grows ever darker as many Wyomingites stare
blankly at the sky and say, “Well, we do need the rain.”
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