Welcome to Planet Utah.

Utah is this strange place of paradoxes. In Salt Lake, city employees have partner benefits. Not just same-sex partner benefits, non-married heterosexual partner benefits. And if your mom is your dependent, you can name her as your partner. In the same city, state representative (and chair of the Utah House Rules Committee) Chris Buttars says the following: "I believe you (the LGBTQ community) will destroy the foundation of American society because I believe the cornerstone of it is a man and a woman and a family. It is, in my mind, the beginning of the end. Oh it's worse than that. Sure, Sodom and Gomorrah was localized, this is world-wide. You can't tell me that something was going on in Sodom and Gomorrah is not going on wholesale right now and to a large degree among the gay community... The underbelly is they do not want equality, they want superiority. I believe that, internally, they are the greatest threat to America going down that I know of."

Utah was settled largely by the Mormon migration. Now native peoples once healthy and peaceful on this land are now confined to tiny reservations with little access to health care facilities. And the caption in the State Capitol reads, "In Utah, everyone is from someplace else."

Here snow falls and melts - saturates and dries - the sun warms and the night freezes - all in 12 hours.

Here the valley is flat, flat, flat at the foot of Mt. Olympus.

Here in the land of big sky, Salt Lake has some of the worst air pollution in the nation. Sometimes you can't even see the mountains.

And here, here... I have found a community of advocates, a local church committee on church and society, a Muslim school, Turkish women hosting multicultural events encouraging theological and intellectual dialogue.

'Welcome,' Linda said to me as we left the Capitol, 'to Planet Utah.'