The politics of pride: Candidates speak at Logan’s first-ever pride festival

Across the street from the Logan Tabernacle, in the parking lot behind some of Logan’s staple Main Street businesses, several hundred people attending Logan’s first annual pride festival gravitated toward a small stage.

Democratic gubernatorial nominee Mike Weinholtz was up.

The Logan Pride Festival is being heralded by event organizers as a complete success. The turn out of an estimated 2,500 people and positive reception from attendees far exceeded organizers’ expectations. Kaylee Litson, a festival planning committee member, said the success of these events is in part due to the politics that come with them. She said pride events wouldn’t be around if it weren’t for community politicking and activism.

“Notice there’s no Republican candidates out here today,” said Weinholtz, onstage, in his three-minute speech. “The Democratic Party is the party that cares about this community, and we will always be that party.”

After a morning of talking to festival-goers at his own booth, Weinholtz touched on his staple points, making sure to differentiate from incumbent Utah Governor Gary Herbert on each. Increased funding for education, the foolishness of the Utah Transfer of Public Lands Act and the governor’s 12,000 lawsuits against the federal government were all touted by Weinholtz to raucous applause from listeners, but his history with the LGBT community brought the loudest applause.

Weinholtz said both he and his wife have fought for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights for the past 20 years, lobbying for three years in a row to the business community to pass an anti-discrimination bill in Utah. A year before the “Utah Compromise” bill was passed in 2015, Donna Weinholtz, Mike’s wife, was arrested for her involvement in a sit-in protest that insisted Utah legislators consider the anti-discrimination bill.

“Gov. Herbert has sued multiple times to overturn the progress and the rights that have been obtained by the LGBT community, including trying to repeal marriage,” Mike Weinholtz said. “We’ve been fighting for this community for a long time,” Mike added. “This is where our heart is.”

Candidate for Cache Valley’s fifth district David Clark quickly echoed many of Mike’s major talking points before vouching for an economy that provides opportunities for businesses and recognizes the people who make up those businesses, “including the members of our great Hispanic community here in Cache Valley.”

But the star of the brief political rally was a name completely unknown to the Utah political scene until this year.

Misty Snow, a 31-year-old Harmon’s grocery store worker, is now the first transgender nominee from a major party to run for a U.S. Senate seat and, if elected, would be the first millennial in the Senate.

“Sen. Mike Lee is not a friend of the LGBT community,” Snow said of Lee, who has served in the Senate since 2011. “He is not here at pride today and he has never been at any pride event because he doesn’t like us in the LGBT community.”

“I make it to as many of these events as I can because I think these events are important,” she said. “It’s important that our voice is heard and that we show we are people too.”

Snow briefly touched on the need for cleaner air and renewable energy, an issue that Utahns overwhelmingly said is the biggest detraction of living in the state, according to a 2015 poll by Envision Utah.

“The poisoned air that we are creating is causing health problems for our elderly, our children and our mothers, and that’s unacceptable.

One third of Snow’s speech addressed minimum wage.

“I make less than $30,000 a year at my job; I work in a grocery store,” she said. “I am a working class person who understands the needs of working class people and their families.”

Snow said over the course of several years the minimum wage needs to be raised to $15 an hour, an issue that the Democratic Party adopted to its party platform just this year.

“If we work hard, we can get it passed,” she said.

— jacksonmurphy111@gmail.com

@jackwhoisnice