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Show Qyclops By BRIAN GRAY 1990 winner of Cyclops dumb quote If the man is so sensitive to walking walk-ing inside a church building, I shudder to think whom he'd vote for. (My gosh, he might even vote for a commission candidate who wears a skeleton costume to a Meet the Candidates Night!) So the race has ended until 1991. The attorney is the winner, joining a long list of worthy Utahns as recipients reci-pients of the Annual Cyclops Dumb Quote of the Year Award. In the meantime, wait for more Dumb Quotes this winter. In only two months, the Utah Legislature will be in session. Last week we presented a historical overview of the Annual Cyclops Dumb Quote of the Year Award. This week we return to the present with the 1990 recipient. For a while, it appeared that the winner of the Dumb Quote Award would be a politician, albeit one of a different stripe. In fact, I would have wagered that Libertarian Party chairman Larry Livingston would have been a shoo-in for the award, considering several comments he made prior to Tuesday's election. For example, Livingston a candidate can-didate for the Davis County Commission-was profiled in a Salt Lake-based newspaper tabloid as saying, "I hope Jerry Purdy wins the Republican nomination because I know I can beat him." Livingston supported this prognostication by figuring that every voter in Davis County who was not a Republican would cast their ballot for a Liber- i tarian. When he first said it, it was merely mere-ly a silly and over-optimistic quote. It approached Dumb Quote status only after Purdy thumped Livingston Liv-ingston in the election by a 75 percent per-cent to 25 percent margin. Livingston took another shot at ! the Dumb Quote Award in October at a Meet the Candidates forum. There, Livingston-who would later appear dressed in a skeleton employment? If Livingston is correct, cor-rect, Bountiful would become a tent city for the homeless instead of "the city of beautiful homes and gardens." But Livingston didn't win the 1990 Dumb Quote of the Year. This year's award went to an attorney who compared LDS Church buildings to neighborhood beer joints. The Dumb Quote resulted from legal arguments that an excommunicated excom-municated Mormon should not have to enter a church ward building in order to vote. Since voting facilities must allow access to handicapped individuals, Utah counties often conduct voting in local churches. In 1988, for instance, about 10 percent of the total voting booths were in churchs-and of these 35 church buildings, seven were Mormon wards. The lawyer argued that one of these LDS wards was the very same place in which his client had been excommunicated, supposedly creating a situation in which the man would suffer bouts of psychological pain, agony and human suffering upon entering the structure. And then the attorney made his award-winning quotation: "Just as some persons might be offended if they were required to vote in a neighborhood beer joint, a state liquor store or an x-rated movie house, so too may persons be offended by having to vote in a church of which they are not members." In comparing an LDS ward to a neighborhood beer joint, liquor store or dirty movie theater, the attorney at-torney is comparing apples to meat loaf. The only common denominator de-nominator between a church building and the x-rated movie theater is that both were designed by a contractor. Furthermore, it's a stretch to say that any normal human being would be offended by having to walk into "a church of which they are not a member." There might be a few pious souls who would be offended by having to hear a sermon.. .There are some others who might be offended at hearing a prayer.. .But the mere act of walking into a church building is not the type of activity geared to bring br-ing goose-bumps to any sane Utahn. This is not to say that every building is equal in comfort. The average Davis County resident would rather not walk into a hospital's intensive care unit, the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant or an auditor's office at the Internal Revenue Service. But even in these cases, we wouldn't be offended by the presence of bricks and mortar. costume-took a jab at Purdy s educational edu-cational background by saying, "I can't get a job in this county because educators take up all the money. ' As a Dumb Quote nominee, that Livingston statement had substanceas a little simple math will show. Davis County has ap proximately 88,000 adults, only 2,300 of whom are teachers, giving us a ratio of one teacher to every 37 persons who work somewhere else. Therefore, if a teacher is such a sponge soaking up all the money, how do the other 37 people find 1 . - . |