utah's biggest gay rights group endorsed the republican over the gay guy

via Axios Salt Lake City and ABC4's Inside Utah Politics.

Some of the Democratic officials publicly asking Equality Utah to explain itself this week are people Equality Utah is currently endorsing. That is the odd shape of this fight. It is not a rival group throwing rocks. It is the slate.

The trigger: Equality Utah's PAC endorsed Republican Mike Bird for Salt Lake County Council District 3, over Luke Maynes, a Democrat who is openly LGBTQ. A coalition of local Democratic elected officials responded by asking the state's largest LGBTQ advocacy organization to "take a hard look at how these decisions were made and recommit to its mission going forward." There were, they noted, "talented, openly queer candidates on the ballot this year," and the group either passed on them or backed the other guy. They called it "a departure from what this organization is supposed to stand for."

Equality Utah's answer is that it has an independent board and weighs a candidate's "commitment to Utah's LGBTQ community, their ability to build bridges and govern effectively, the strength and viability of their campaigns, the potential impact of an endorsement, and the strategic opportunities presented by each race."

Translated: in a state where Republicans hold everything worth holding, an endorsement is a relationship, and a relationship with the person who will be in the room beats a nice letter to the person who will not. Equality Utah has spent two decades making that argument with receipts.

The counter is also real. Queer people get elected when organizations like this one put weight behind them, and a group that keeps deciding the gay candidate is not viable helps make sure of it. Pragmatism that only ever runs one direction stops being a strategy and becomes a habit.

Nobody here is a villain, which is exactly why it will be argued about until November. We have watched Democrats find out what happens when they treat us as a liability to manage. Utah is running that experiment from the other end.