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A small-town newspaper finds itself in the middle of a brewing controversy after publishing a wedding announcement for a lesbian couple. Now some people are complaining.
The Herald Journal in Logan has received calls, e-mails, and one fired-up letter to the editor from Narayne Rougeau.
"It's not a legally-recognized marriage in the state of Utah. So to run it as such, I find offensive. That's no different than running somebody else who decides to live together without benefit of marriage," she said.
She says you might as well rename the section "co-habitations" or "commitment ceremonies."
Rougeau says she isn't making a moral judgment. She says the problem is a gay wedding announcement was placed in the paper when that kind of marriage is illegal in Utah. She says if the announcement had mentioned that the wedding had taken place in California, she wouldn't have written in.
"For them to say that the marriage was going to take place in Salt Lake City on the 8th of August, they knew that wasn't true," Rougeau says. "But they ran it anyway, under political correctness, or for whatever reason they chose to do that."
She claims, "It's no different than if the paper had run the marriage of a polygamist man who had several wives and run it in the paper. I really would be curious if The Herald Journal would have run a picture like that, too."
The announcement says the couple is "pleased to announce their marriage ... at Memory Grove Park in Salt Lake City."
The publisher of the Herald Journal, Bruce Smith, is offering no apology. "These are paid announcements, and we didn't feel we could deny anybody access to that announcement just because they were gay," he said.
The newspaper says it came up with a policy in 2006, but this is the first time it has come into play. It says the same applies to obituaries, where listing of homosexual partners has happened before, and where the paper would "never think of injecting its own moral code."
E-mail: aadams@ksl.com
