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TAYLORSVILLE, Utah (AP) -- Singing to the choir, Sen. Chris Buttars sought support at the Eagle Forum annual convention for his proposed legislation on teaching intelligent design and banning high school gay/straight support clubs.
And support he received, with Utah Eagle Forum president Gayle Ruzicka saying, "I love Chris Buttars," and national Eagle Forum found Phyllis Schlafly telling him, "Senator Buttars, you're our kind of guy."
Buttars told the gathering Saturday at Salt Lake Community College that he knows the reaction of the scientific community to his Origins of Life bill will be, "How dare you dumb people challenge us scientists."
His bill, SB96, contends that not all scientists agree on only one theory about the origins of life or the origins of the present state of the human race.
Teaching evolution while leaving out creationism "hurts young people," Buttars said.
He cited a mother who said her two daughters were told by a teacher that they evolved from animals, and, "It totally destroyed their faith."
SB96 requires that no origin of life discussions in the classroom endorse a particular theory and that talks consider opposing viewpoints.
State education officials have said Buttars' legislation opens the door to the teaching of intelligent design, which a federal judge has ruled unconstitutional.
Buttars has not yet revealed the language in his bill to ban gay clubs in public schools. But he said that two constitutional lawyers say it will pass muster in the courts.
"This gay issue is everywhere -- they're getting into everything," he said.
Buttars accused gays of changing the landscape of morality in America.
"Their definition of morality is to have no morality," he said.
Buttars told his audience that gays and lesbians are targeting "your kids."
He said opposition to the gay/lesbian lifestyle is a battle that his side is losing.
Buttars said gays want to appear as victims in the fight and that they characterize opponents as bigots, narrow-minded and out of touch with reality.
He said gays threaten lawsuits and cover up the down side to being gay -- which, according to a handout Buttars used, covers a host of medical maladies.
As for gay-straight alliances in schools, Buttars believes that, like a chess club that gets together to talk about playing chess, gay and lesbian students gather to talk about sex.
Doug Wortham a gay French teacher at the private Rowland Hall-St. Mark's School, where there is a gay/straight alliance, "I have never heard them talk about sex in any way that would alarm anyone. It's a support club, not a sex club."
He said the alliance is there for students who want to deal with their sexual orientation in a safe environment.
"If you really want to shut down sex in schools, then shut down the boys' locker room," Wortham said.
There now are 14 gay-straight clubs in Utah public schools, said Stan Burnett, director of youth programs for the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center of Utah.
Supporters of the gay-straight clubs contend they are protected by the federal Equal Access Act. The law, which was co-sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, requires any public secondary school accepting federal funds to allow all school clubs equal access to its facilities. It was aimed at protecting student religious activities.
Opponents of Buttars' proposed legislation have contended that it would run afoul the same legal obstacles as previous attempts to ban the clubs did.
Buttars said his bill would give power to school boards that are "weak in the knees" when faced with lawsuits from the American Civil Liberties Union and that it will give teeth to an unenforced 1994 state law Buttars believes could be applied to this subject.
"I guarantee, if I lose this time, you probably won't get to rise again on this issue," he told the Eagle Forum convention.
Schlafly also addressed the convention, which drew 150 to 200 people.
She said the Bush administration's support of a "guest worker" program and other exceptions to U.S. immigration policy is feeding a $140 billion organized criminal racket that makes victims of citizens and immigrants alike.
Schlafly said those who want the border loosened because immigrants are needed to work jobs Americans don't want undermine the nation's egalitarian principles.
"There isn't any job that Americans are too good to do," she said. "This is creating a serf class, a peasant class. ... That's not America."
She said that if the tide of illegal immigration to the United States doesn't stop, "we might as well give up on the drug war."
She said the undocumented workers are at the mercy of an underground economy peopled by corrupt employers who underpay them or don't pay them at all.
She said large corporations join in the victimization when they sponsor workers from overseas, claiming they have a shortage of qualified workers here. She contends that is not true.
She said those foreign workers are at their employers' mercy, virtually indentured because if they quit their jobs, they can't get another.
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
