Utah Defeats Tyranny Of LGBTQ And Women's Centers On College Campuses
Utah Defeats Tyranny Of LGBTQ And Women's Centers On College Campuses
Legislators might have forgotten that universities coopted radical student unions for a reason, and it wasn't for the benefit of the students.
Oh, Utah. Why you gotta do us like that?
While San Francisco, Paris, Lagos, and hundreds of other cities were shutting down the streets to celebrate Pride and demand justice during the last week of June, Utah was shutting down LGBT and women’s centers and doing something weird to its cultural centers.
On July 1 — that’d be today — HB 261, a new state law banning “diversity, equity, and inclusion” efforts in Utah education (DEI), goes into effect. As the state’s flagship public institution of higher learning, the University of Utah’s closures and restructuring are getting the most attention, including in the Washington Post. Other universities in the state, however, are also losing queer, women’s, and cultural centers, emphasis on the queer.
HB 261 passed at the beginning of the year and was signed January 30 by Governor Spencer Cox (Wonkette’s favorite name for a state governor since Idaho’s Butch Otter) with the apparent goal of protecting straight, white Mormon guys from cultural irrelevance. This, we remind you, in a state whose official tourism office advertises Utah as a place to come see monotonous white nothingness stretching for miles and miles in every direction. Among other items, the law bans “prohibited discriminatory practices,” specifically to include:
engaging in or maintaining a policy, procedure, practice, program, office, initiative, or required training that, based on an individual's personal identity characteristics: [do bad things that Utah legislators don’t like]
We would specify all the things Utah legislators do not like, but the list is long and you can read 53B-1-118 (1) (c) (I) (A-L) for yourself, right? Okay, we will give you just one, because it amuses Our Royal Selves to do so:
(L) is referred to or named diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Obviously HB 261 was created to end trans tyranny, racial regimes and gynocratic generalissimo governorships (still dead), which have repressed the populace of Utah throughout this second Age of Steam (that’s a “hot air” joke).
Thus the essential existential exigency of shutting down religious, racial, cultural, women’s, and queer centers. There are some difficulties with this approach, of course. For instance federal law requires certain minimal efforts to support marginalized students at higher risk of failing to complete a degree. Thus the Black Cultural Center has been told it will not be ended so much as administratively transferred. It put up this message with the last gasp of its freedom to speak:
The Black Cultural Center website has been disabled
To comply with HB 261, student resources and support programs previously managed by the Black Cultural Center will now be administered by the Center for Student Access and Resources. Additonally, cultural education, celebration activites, and awareness programs previously managed by the Black Cultural Center will, for now, be administered by the Center for Cultural and Community Engagement.
Other sources clarify that the BCC will be converted to a “community gathering space.” This is consistent with the law’s requirement that Black programs are welcome so long as there is no emphasis on Blackness that might discourage white participation. Wonkette presumes that they will hold student dances and such, at least until Tracy Turnblad shows up to make trouble and traitor her guilty race.
It’s unclear exactly how the Black Cultural Center will continue to play its important role on campus while administered by the Center for Student Access for the benefit of all students, though perhaps historians will be able to provide some insight after researching how race relations functioned on the University of Utah campus before the BCC’s founding a few generations ago in … [checks notes] … 2019. The shuttering of the BCC website doesn’t provide much reason to hope it can remain relevant.
Shockingly the UU LGBT resource center was founded in 2002, 17 years before the BCC, while the women’s center and an ethnic student affairs center (each known by more than one name over their existences) had been around for more than 50 years. The closures were not inevitable, though, according to WaPo:
The law doesn’t mandate the closure of student centers, allowing them to stay open as cultural centers as long as they don’t also provide student services.
This isn’t immediately obvious from the law’s text, but rather part of the regulatory guidance on the law formalized in May by the Utah System of Higher Education. Mitzi Montoya, the University Provost, wrote in a note to faculty reported by WaPo:
“This is not the path we would have chosen […] But … it is our calling to rise to the challenges of the day and find a better way forward.”
An earlier public message from the provost’s office stated that, “As we’ve evaluated how best to comply with the legislation, I want to be clear that we’ve faced very difficult decisions,” but did not detail how or why they decided to close some important institutions while merely “reorganizing” others. Given that it was possible to retain student centers separate from student services — indeed Utah Valley University, which given its putative “largest student body in the state” Wonkette will graciously stipulate exists and is a thing — not closing its LGBT center. A cynic might assume politics of some kind is involved, though yr Wonkette would not be so crass as to suggest such a thing, even obliquely.
But the law prompting these closures is part of a testerical political campaign calculated to further marginalize the marginalized and empower the powerful (yes, even in a woke gynocracy like Utah). Given that, it’s not entirely bad that this is happening during the commemoration of the 55th anniversary of the Stonewall/Christopher Street rebellion. The timing reminds us that Pride didn’t start out as a commercial event with your local microbrewer printing their contact info on rainbow silicone popsicle molds to throw to excited families along a parade route any more than student resource centers began life as gifts of a loving board of regents.
Pride started as a riot. Similarly, in the 1960s marginalized queer and women and Black students took over campus rooms or fraternity buildings (and, yes, sometimes the administrations’ own offices) and made them into spaces for radical welcoming and subversive activism; university recognition came much later. The progression from unofficial student unions to official ones to resource centers is the story of the cooptation of marginalized people by institutions to serve institutional interests. And while fighting for a seat at a table is a worthy goal, and accepting seats at various tables were seen as victories in those various moments, the decisions now handed down from those tables ignore the value and contributions of those communities who fought for acceptance.
In Utah as in many other places (looking at you, Texas) those tables seek to remarginalize entire communities as a threat to the status quo, indeed as literally tyrannical, should they exercise any democratic influence on governance, and as pedophilically abusive should they exercise any social, educational, or parental influence on children. If the administration can do this at the University of Utah, then seats offered to marginalized students were already no longer serving their purpose. And that presents an opportunity to see this legislatively orchestrated version of Mormon musical chairs in a very different light.
WaPo begins its story about this mess with the story of Becket Harris, a trans student who wonders:
“What am I going to do without my space on campus? How’s my friend group going to stay together?”
We here at Wonkette remind Harris and others that as hard as it may be to simultaneously pursue an education and organize against unjust authority, it has been done before. Indeed organizing can become an education itself — which Utah’s legislators should have considered before it dispensed with “resource centers.”
Previously in the Gynocratic Racial Trans-Commonwealth of Utah:
Your friendly, neighbourhood Crip Dyke also writes other perverted stuff!
Over 30 years ago, I accepted a full merit scholarship from a university in Texas (including tuition & fees, room & board, and a book stipend, even!). I graduated with a degree in English and a minor in Womens’ Studies.
Any day now, I expect Gov. Abbott’s thugs to show up, burn my diploma, and demand I pay restitution for my degree - with interest, of course.
I wonder how many accommodations UU, USU, Weber St, etc make for specific reasons related to Mormons.
It's cool if I have an organization that doesn't *specifically* exclude members of the LDS, but it's just a coincidence that there aren't any members who are?