Utah: Extremes and Extreme Contradictions

March 16,2009 — -- Utah. Take it or leave it.

In an unscientific study of scientific studies, Utah always comes out on top -- or all the way on the bottom. And sometimes it comes out on top and on the bottom in studies about the same thing.

In short, it is a land of extremes and extreme contradictions.

In surveys conducted one year apart, by institutions no less illustrious than Gallup and Mental Health America, Utah was named, respectively, the happiest state in the country and the most depressed state in the union.

It is a place of extreme landscapes -- salt flats, deserts, mountains, the Great Salt Lake -- and, some say, extreme people strident in the protection of their values and fiercely proud of their history.

It is a state so dedicated to protecting the moral interests of its residents that the NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City won't air "Saturday Night Live" because it deems it too risque. Yet, despite its values-based rhetoric, the state is also the country's No. 1 consumer of online pornography, according to a recent study conducted by Harvard University.

Last week, the state legislature overturned a decades-old law that forced people to complete a membership application when they visited a "private club" -- what the rest of America calls a bar. The law was repealed after a compromise with conservative lawmakers.

Now, instead of membership, anyone who enters a bar and appears to be less than 35 years old will have their identification card scanned and information stored in a digital database for a week.

Republican Gov. John Huntsman, who opposed the database because he said "that [it] would enhance the oddness of our laws," is now working to change another oddity about the state's alcohol laws -- a rule that forces bartenders to mix drinks out of the sight of customers.

"The liquor thing is weird," said Heather Armstrong, a Utah transplant who writes the popular blog dooce.com.

"There is this sense that the church and the government have to take care of us," said Armstrong, a former Mormon. "There is a paradox in that Mormonism gives people free will and then the legislature takes all your choices away."