A few weeks ago, a lovely woman in my stake* (*large-ish geographical area consisting of several neighboring Mormon congregations) invited me to a cottage meeting at her home. She told me a few senators and our local Utah House of Rep, Becky Edwards, would be in attendance, along with two Utah Organizations: Mormons Building Bridges and Equality Utah. My friend's hope long-range hope for the meetings like this one was that our elected officials would see that people in our community care about/ are related to/ are/ and are in support of our LGBTQ neighbors... for the purpose of eventually passing legislation where "hate crimes" carry a heftier penalty than crimes deemed as not hate crimes. (For example, spray painting "I love Roses!" on a wall doesn't create fear or intimidation, whereas "Die____ _____ ____!" does.) The above scenarios demonstrate similar crimes (both illegally spray painted) but result in way different outcomes. So there's that. Anyways, my friend who was playing hostess with the mostess was unable to attend her own cottage meeting (due to the passing of an elderly grandparent) so I got to play the part of Cottage Metting Barbi. Lucky me! It was a wonderful meeting. Lots of good mingling with many people that I didn't know and the food was good too. Baby steps in the right direction.
Mingling. I got to chance with Becky about my free feminine hygiene products.
More mingling. Those giant red flowers on the right were even more stunning in person.
All the big wigs got a chance to share some thoughts.
I ended up eating 2X as much as I should have... bc I don't just like food, I'm also apparently a nervous eater. They also had pickled beets. I love pickled beets.
*January 16th, 2018*
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