By Jonathan Selden
Gayle Ruzicka isn”t a state legislator.
But, it took one state senator, one representative, the governor”s office and the criminal prosecutor”s association to try to convince her to persuade legislators to support this year”s hate crimes bill.
All they could do was get her to stay silent.
“I”m just doing nothing. I still have concerns,” she said.
Sen. Pete Suazo, D-Salt Lake City, has seen his hate crimes bill stop breathing twice this session, only to have it resuscitated on the way to the morgue. Ruzicka, president of the super-conservative Utah Eagle Forum, has been its enemy No. 1.
“She”s tenacious. She”s pretty influential,” said Paul Boyden, executive director of the Statewide Association of Prosecutors.
On the morning of Wednesday, Feb. 28, Suazo tried to get the House to consider his bill one last time, but the Rules Committee that held the bill refused to release it for debate.
His last hope was one that failed Monday, Feb. 26, to lift the bill from rules by a majority vote.
Barring any X-Files type phenomenon that sometimes accompanies legislative politics, the proposed hate crimes law appeared, late Wednesday night, to be as dead as when the day started.
As the session wore to a close and legislators recessed to eat whatever finger food they could find, Ruzicka interrupted them to say she had changed her mind.
“Somebody started rumors that I”ve changed my position. I am totally, 100 percent against it. Always have been,” she said.
And with that went the vote of conservative legislators who look to Ruzickah for guidance on most moral issues.
