SALT LAKE CITY, UT — Just hours after Utah became the first state in the nation to ban LGBTQ Pride flags from public schools and government buildings, state compliance officer Dell Brockman was reportedly already inside Maple Grove Elementary, gently prying a Crayola rendering of an arched, multicolored sky out of the laminated cubby of a second-grader who said she’d drawn it for her mom.
The new law, which Gov. Spencer Cox allowed to become law without signature in a gesture observers described as ‘the legislative equivalent of leaving a $20 on the dresser and slipping out the side door,’ bars the display of any unauthorized flag in classrooms or on government property, with violations triggering a $500 fine per day per flag.
‘This isn’t about anyone’s identity. This is about keeping politics out of public spaces,’ said state Rep. Trevor Lee, standing six feet from a wall on which the Utah state flag, the U.S. flag, the POW/MIA flag, a ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ banner, and a framed portrait of Ronald Reagan signing something were all currently visible. ‘Children should be able to walk into a school and see only neutral, apolitical imagery, like the Ten Commandments, which we are also working on.’
Under the bill’s broad definitions, sources confirmed, banned displays now include rainbow lanyards, rainbow stickers, rainbow erasers, the Pixar logo, a poster for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, any prism left near a sunny window, and one elementary school’s long-running ‘Reading Is Magic’ bulletin board, which a Davis County compliance memo flagged as ‘gay in effect, if not in stated intent.’
The Beehive State, which derives its nickname from a swarming insect colony organized around a single matriarch and famous for producing something sweet, will continue to permit the Confederate battle flag in classroom history displays, the Gadsden flag in faculty parking lots, and one Pleasant Grove high school’s homemade banner reading ‘GO COUGS BEAT THE GAYS,’ which administrators clarified refers to the rival mascot of Brighton High and is therefore protected speech.
‘My daughter asked me what was wrong with her picture, and I genuinely could not come up with a sentence,’ said Murray resident Anna Halverson, whose seven-year-old’s drawing was confiscated Wednesday and entered into evidence. ‘The inspector took it in a manila folder. He said it would be returned at the conclusion of the investigation. He would not tell me what the investigation was.’
Reached for comment, Cox emphasized that the legislation ‘isn’t really my preferred approach’ and that he had ‘serious concerns,’ before clarifying that those concerns had been registered by allowing the bill to become law in total silence from a windowless office in which, witnesses noted, every wall remained scrupulously, patriotically bare.
At press time, Brockman had moved on to his next stop, where he was carefully measuring the angle of light passing through a stained-glass window at the Salt Lake County Library to determine whether the resulting spectrum on the carpet constituted a display, an accident, or, as he muttered into his clipboard, ‘a pretty clear-cut case of God breaking the law.’