A First for Everything
Misty Snow, Mike Lee, and Me
The most recent opportunity I had to clap on command in front of cameras was at the Utah Debate Commission’s debate of two of Utah’s U.S. Senate candidates. Stage right was Mike Lee, a very tightly-shaven politician of national recognition. To his left was Misty Snow, a grocery store clerk. As I settled into my seat in the BYU TV studio, I wondered if this was the first time they had ever met.
My friend Jen, seated next to me, whispered, “This is the first time I’ve been part of a TV audience.” The first time I was ever part of a TV audience was at “The Bozo Show” at age six. I didn’t get picked for Bozo Buckets, but I did meet Bozo and Cooky.
The first time I met Mike Lee was the summer of 2012. He held a town hall meeting for his constituents in Logan, Utah. I witnessed firsthand his geeky charisma and charm for storytelling. At the end of the meeting, I approached and asked him about Grover Norquist’s “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” an agreement signed by most Congressional Republicans, including Lee, vowing “to oppose any and all tax increases.” I started to ask Lee if there was any circumstance, foreseeable or not, wherein he would consider raising taxes. Before I could even finish the question, he answered firmly and without additional nuance, “No.”
“Not even if there’s some sort of national emer—”
“Nope.”
I wondered if he thought I was trying to trap him, or if he thought he was giving me the answer I wanted to hear. He moved on to another questioner, and I moved on towards the door. Mike Lee was the first U.S. Senator I had ever met.
I wonder now if Misty Snow had ever met any Senators before she had to debate one on live TV.
“I am 31 years old,” she said in her opening statement, “and if I’m elected to the U.S. Senate, I’ll be the very first millennial in the U.S. Senate, making me a voice for my generation.” This was the first time I had heard her speak.
Jen first encountered Snow earlier in the year at a workshop facilitated by a group called Real Women Run. It’s a nonpartisan organization that encourages Utah women to run for political office on all levels. The presence of women in most areas of Utah politics is very low—for example, about 15 percent of the Utah legislature is female, and a woman has never served as U.S. Senator for Utah. Snow would be the first.
At the workshop, Snow appeared to Jen to be one of the more assertive participants.
“She was was uber-prepared. She asked all these really specific questions,” Jen told me during the car ride to the debate. “She knew a whole lot about running for Senator.”
Snow would go on to enter the U.S. Senate race as a Democrat, taking on primary opponent Jonathan Swinton, another first-time politician. The 35-year-old marriage counselor’s actual slogans were, “Washington Needs a Marriage Counselor,” and, “A More Perfect Union.” (I don’t know of a comprehensive way to determine this, but Swinton could well have been the first marriage counselor elected to the Senate.) The Democratic and unaffiliated voters of Utah disagreed, and instead they nominated the grocery store clerk. Consequently, those voters placed her in the same Provo TV studio as Sen. Mike Lee.
On a range of audience-submitted questions—many of which were tailor-made for slam-dunk progressive sound bites—Snow was largely conciliatory towards Lee. On a question about gun control, Snow refused to implicate Lee for inaction. She took the same tack when the topic of climate change was broached. (“Climates change. It’s what they do,” Lee explained. “They always have, and always will.”) Instead of chiding the Senator for his blasé attitude towards this latest episode of abruptly changing climates, Snow shifted the conversation towards Utah’s air quality woes.
It was nearly a cordial discourse of like minds until around the halfway mark, when moderator David Magleby invited a BYU student named Kim Anderson to step up to the microphone. She asked the candidates, “What is the proper balance between religious liberties and the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender citizens? Are we near the balance now? And if not, what would you advocate?”
Lee was given the first response.
“It’s important to understand there are two different types of discrimination that we sometimes see in our society,” he started. “One type of discrimination we might call ‘private’ is what happens when two individuals interact. And the other type, which we might call ‘public’ discrimination, is when government itself discriminates against its own disfavored citizens, based on some characteristic disfavored by those in power.”
Lee explained that both of these forms of discrimination are bad—“deadly, ugly, and some of the worst things that we see.” But as he sees it, “public” discrimination is much worse because of the government’s pervasive influence in our lives.
“I’m fully convinced that LGBT rights and religious liberties can thrive in the same environment, and what the government needs to do is take a position of non-discrimination,” Lee said. “It’s not going to discriminate against people on the basis of their religious beliefs, and it’s going to treat all people, regardless of their race or regardless of their sexual orientation, with dignity and compassion and respect.”
Snow, somewhat unsurprisingly at this point in debate, responded with an agreeable restatement of Lee’s anti-discrimination sentiments.
“The balance of religious rights and rights of minorities is that people have the right to believe in whatever religion they want, whatever god or goddess or gods they want. They have the right to worship how they want, and that is a great, cherished value of our nation.” But then she diverged ever so slightly from Lee. “At the same time, you cannot use those rights to supersede the rights of others. Religious rights, like all rights, end where the rights of other individuals begin.”
Snow went on to explain that treating everyone equally should not be considered an undue burden for businesses or individuals. “I think most people agree with that. You need to show equal treatment and show love and compassion to all people.”
Something about Snow’s milquetoast appeal for love and compassion compelled Lee to request a rebuttal. He responded by plugging the First Amendment Defense Act, a bill he sponsors that intends to bar any federal agency from “discriminating against a religious institution or individual based on a religious belief about marriage.”
This was the first time the issue of marriage came up in the debate—an issue Snow didn’t much care to address in her response. Instead she dismissed FADA as a a legalization of “discrimination in the name of religion.” To illustrate her point, she cited the case of a transgender man named Robert Eads, who died of ovarian cancer in 1999 after doctors at numerous hospitals initially refused to treat him. It was discrimination from private hospitals, Snow claimed, that killed Eads.
Magleby was about to move on to a new question when Lee interrupted to request another rebuttal. The moderator stingily offered ten seconds to each candidate.
“If you take a look at the First Amendment Defense Act, it does not cover what you describe,” Lee said. “What we’re talking about here is protecting religious individuals and institutions like BYU so that their tax-exempt status cannot be denied, and so that no other adverse action can be taken against them based on their religious beliefs.”
Snow replied, “I would encourage religious institutions, like BYU or any other, to treat all students equally regardless of whether or not they’re LGBT. I think that is the loving, humane, compassionate thing to do.”
For the first time and only time, unsanctioned clapping broke out from a pro-Snow corner of the room. It was the first moment of the debate when Snow could claim a victory, and it was only because Lee refused to accept Snow’s mild deviation from his own insipid rap against discrimination. On the question of balancing religious rights with LGBT rights, it appeared that Snow sought to defend “love and compassion”—while Lee sought to defend more esoteric precepts of religious conviction.
But it wasn’t until her closing remarks when Snow truly delivered her first big punch to Lee.
“There’s a number of issues I would’ve liked to have talked about that didn’t get brought up,” Snow said, curiously employing a passive voice. “I‘d like to point out that Sen. Mike Lee voted against renewal of the Violence Against Women Act in 2013. He also blocked aid to Flint, which is forcing children to drink water contaminated with lead and to bathe in water contaminated with lead.”
She said this hurriedly, as though the moderator had secretly allotted Snow only ten seconds to deliver her most scathing critiques of Lee’s first term in office. It was an awkward moment because Lee had no opportunity to respond to these new claims, having already delivered his closing statement.
After the debate, Lee explained why earlier this year he had unilaterally blocked federal aid to Flint, Mich., a city beset by a protracted water contamination crisis.
“What happened in Flint was a local water company messed up,” he said. “They installed a new water system without testing it, and as a result they produced contaminated water that had unacceptably dangerous, high levels of lead.” Lee then asserted that the state of Michigan is financially equipped to handle the crisis and should pay for the cleanup, healthcare costs, and ensuing infrastructure fixes on their own dime.
He’s not without a point: Michigan is running a budget surplus, and they do have a rainy-day fund worth hundreds of millions of dollars. (The federal aid package would have been worth about $220 million.) It’s also informative to note that it wouldn’t have cost the Feds much of anything to provide the aid—the money would have been diverted from an existing, underutilized stimulus program for the auto industry.
Additionally notable is the fact that Flint is a city of roughly 100,000 people, where 6,000 to 12,000 children may have been exposed to lead levels as high as seven times the legal limit. Lead poisoning can permanently damage a child’s brain, resulting in lower IQ, learning disabilities, behavioral disorders, and increased aggression, in addition to anemia, infertility, hypertension, kidney failure, and a host of other problems up to and including death. In other words, the first time a child is poisoned by lead is too late.
As a candidate looking to align herself with a “love and compassion” approach to governance, it’s easy to see why Misty Snow the grocery store clerk wanted to bring up Flint in this debate. The “loving, humane, compassionate” thing to do about Flint is to do anything. A compassionate person sees what’s happening in Flint, empathically adopts the mental and emotional position of the people directly affected, and wonders, “What can I, as an individual in a relative position of favor, do to help?”
Lee may be a compassionate person in his private life, but as a politician he offers a different approach. The junior Senator has built his political reputation not on doing the compassionate thing, but rather on doing The Right Thing. Every impulse can be attributed to a completely predictable and uncompromising adherence to lean, dispassionate principles. He’s the kind of lawmaker who would sign a pledge to never raise taxes and stick to that promise without flinching, even if, say, a faulty national water infrastructure suddenly exposed every American child to lead poisoning. I learned this about him the first time I met him.
It’s important to understand there are two types of compassion that we sometimes see in our society. The first type of compassion, call it “private” compassion, is what happens when two individuals interact. And the other type, which we might call “public” compassion, is when government itself cares for its own disfavored citizens. Both forms of compassion can be good—they’re some of the best things we see. But between the two, “public” compassion is perhaps the most powerful for the simple reason that, when people are disfavored for reasons they can’t control, people may have nothing but their government to depend on for help. Moreover, there’s a disparity in their power, their ability to help others, because the government operates with overpowering force. It’s what governments do. It’s why they exist in the first place.
After the debate, I ran into Sen. Lee in the lobby outside the TV studio. I shook his hand and congratulated him on a job well done.
“I was wondering what you thought of the history of the moment,” I said.
“Come again?” he asked.
“The history of the moment. The first trans candidate for the Senate?”
At this, he gave me the same cautious, scanning look he gave me four years ago when we first met. Is he trapping me? Is he on my side? Is this guy a Bozo or a Cooky?
“Eh,” he finally replied, “She’s a great candidate. We had a great debate.”
His eyes exited my gaze, and he moved on to shake the buzzer-free hands of clowns with less makeup.
