At Tuesday night’s Salt Lake City Council meeting, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a statement showing it’s support of the city’s proposed non-discrimination regulations . . .

Tuesday’s statement to the city council comes in response to public comment on two proposed anti-discrimination ordinances that would enact two new chapters in the Salt Lake City Code.

The ordinances, one dealing with employment, the other with housing, stem from a report released in July by Mayor Becker and the City’s Human Rights Commission, which found a number of discrimination cases throughout Salt Lake.

What will be curious is if this survey will prompt a review of the “root causes” of such happiness. Just two years ago, Utah was declared the most depressed state which led to a debate whether a locally predominant culture was responsible. Perhaps said culture will now get some of the credit for producing such happiness.

Or perhaps, Utahns are in denial about their depression and just claim to be happy, throwing off the survey takers (Hawaii and Wyoming round out the top three? What a trio). Or possibly, surveys and studies don’t make much more than good headlines.

Numerous sources are now telling ABC 4 that the LDS Church is poised to extend an olive branch of sorts to the gay community.

These sources say the Church is expected to – both through spoken and written statements – to offer its support for proposed Salt Lake City ordinances extending protection to gays in the areas of employment and housing.

Reportedly, the Church has been in quiet discussion with members of Utah’s gay community.

Robert R. King of the McLean 2nd Ward of the McLean Virginia Stake has been nominated by President Barack Obama to be Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues, with the rank of ambassador.

Doesn’t sound like your stereotypical cushy ambassador slot.

The Office of the Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea was created by the North Korea Human Rights Act of 2004, which called for a Special Envoy to “coordinate and promote efforts to improve respect for the fundamental human rights of the people of North Korea.

Brother King formerly worked for Rep. Lantos.

This finely-honed skill helped in my assertion that the Associated Press’ coverage of Elder Oak’s talk was in large part to blame for the civil-rights analogy kerfuffle this week. In anticipation of his talk, Elder Oaks gave the A.P. an interview and his talk’s text to accompany its coverage of his address. With his cooperation and a despite a very substantive talk, the A.P. reporter framed a news story based on one sentence aiming for maximal controversy.  And it worked.

The A.P.’s coverage is not too surprising.  I’ve long thought it covered the Church unfairly, (recent egregious example). But this week, it has also been interesting to see the local Utah media reaction behind the scenes.

The City Weekly jumped on the Deseret News for not covering the civil-rights analogy issue as did all the other news outlets who followed the A.P.’s lead.  In its view (and by way of Twitter, the view of other area reporters), if the D.N. didn’t follow the A.P.’s lead, it wasn’t being fair and balanced. So much for original reporting.

Most remarkable was another post at the City Weekly about an executive news producer at the local Salt Lake Fox affiliate, Fox 13 who violated the Church’s embargo with a tweet. Perhaps not a big deal but her blog about her phone call with the Church’s Public Affairs office and her feelings towards the Church as a former member and its involvement in Proposition 8 is quite an eye opener (to read a sanitized version just read the Weekly’s version, there you can click through to read the very crude and psychodrama-rich original if you dare, but beware). Quite astonishing to realize that this is someone who deals with and reports on the Church as a journalist.

Fox 13 news doesn’t strike me as biased, or anti-LDS.   I do think that it did stoke up the controversy a bit online by tweeting up the story over and over and over and over and over and over again (and no, Elder Oaks did not claim that “Mormon backlash after Prop. 8 [was] similar to treatment of Southern blacks”). But the controversy probably sent them pretty good traffic.

As for their news producer, it’s nice to see news folk let it all hang out and not pretend that they are impassive robots unburdened by the silly squabbles the rest of us mere mortals deal with. Perhaps in such a small news operation she can’t recuse herself from stories when she loathes the subjects she covers. But for her own mental health it might be for the best.

As for the City Weekly, its interesting to read some of the local inside baseball of the journalism scene. But after reading its own coverage and the tweets from other reporters, its laughable to single out the Deseret News as unbalanced. And soliciting for more LDS Public Affair horror stories to confirm your own biases? That’s not high-minded journalism, it’s called blogging. Join the club.

Even more see, “Dallin H. Oaks: Calling for fair reading, fair thinking, fair commentary“

So many of the habits and conventions of modern culture — ubiquitous media, anonymous and unsourced online participation, politicization of the routine, fractured community and family life — undermine the virtues and manners that make peaceful coexistence in a pluralist society possible. The fabric of civil society tears when stretched thin by its extremities. Civility, then, becomes the measure of our collective and individual character as citizens of a democracy.

Please read or listen to it. There is so much more to the talk than what the selective outrage has focused on.

Religious belief is obviously protected against government action. The practice of that belief must have some limits, as I suggested earlier. But unless the guarantee of free exercise of religion gives a religious actor greater protection against government prohibitions than are already guaranteed to all actors by other provisions of the constitution (like freedom of speech), what is the special value of religious freedom? Surely the First Amendment guarantee of free exercise of religion was intended to grant more freedom to religious action than to other kinds of action. Treating actions based on religious belief the same as actions based on other systems of belief should not be enough to satisfy the special place of religion in the United States Constitution.