Utah State Rep. Christine Johnson, an out lesbian, has announced she will not run for reelection.  Her decision follows the retirement of State Sen. Scott McCoy, who recently left the Utah Senate to focus on his law career.  The Salt Lake Tribune reported:

“I’m not leaving because I’m giving up on the fight in Utah,” the two-term Salt Lake City Democrat said Thursday after announcing she won’t seek re-election. “We have so many budding leaders [in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community] that I’m anxious to see who’s going to step up next.”

“For the past four years, I have stood with my colleagues each morning of the session, placed my hand over my heart and pledged ‘liberty and justice for all,’ ” she said in a statement, “and yet repeatedly witnessed blatant disregard of those so in need of equal protections in the name of ‘family values.’ “

Johnson recently garnered national headlines when she told reporters she was pregnant and would be a surrogate mother for a gay couple.  Her retirement leaves State Rep. Jackie Bispkupski as the sole openly LGBT lawmaker in the state capitol.

Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) has introduced a bill to block the District of Columbia from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples until city residents have voted to approve them, according to the Associated Press.

The D.C. City Council passed a marriage equality bill, which was signed by Mayor Adrian Fenty.  It’s due to take effect in March, following a standard period of Congressional review that all locally-passed laws face.  Anti-gay activists have sought to require a vote of D.C. citizens on the issue, but a local commission and the courts have ruled that such a question would violate the city’s laws on the content of ballot initiatives.

A new statewide poll finds Utahns dramatically more open to gay rights measures than they were a year ago, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, with two-thirds of respondents saying they support employment non-discrimination laws for their LGBT fellow citizens.  The findings come on the heels of the Mormon Church’s official support for a Salt Lake City non-discrimination ordinance last fall:

“This isn’t a gradual change of attitudes. This is a fairly dramatic jump,” says Matthew Burbank, chairman of the University of Utah’s political science department. “Clearly, the fact that the LDS Church was officially endorsing this position had an impact on people.”

A similar number of respondents, 66 percent, also say they support expanding Salt Lake City’s anti-discrimination policy — the first of its kind in Utah and already mimicked in Salt Lake County — throughout the state.

Two thirds of respondents also expressed support for some legal protections for same-sex couples, such as hospital visitation and inheritance rights.  Still, 65% opposed amending the state constitution to allow civil unions.

State Rep. Christine Johnson, an out lesbian, recently helped broker a cease fire in the state legislature on LGBT issues.  While she is seeking to expand the Salt Lake City non-discrimination law to cover the entire state, some of her conservative colleagues want to ban even local gay rights laws anywhere in Utah.  Both sides have agreed to study Salt Lake City’s experience for a year before moving ahead with any legislation.

The Log Cabin Republicans are currently working with Utah Gov. Gary Herbert (R) to draft legislation that would protect LGBT citizens from discrimination in the workplace. KCPW reports on the process and its goals:

The group is drafting two bills for the state legislature to consider, one of which would prohibit job discrimination based on sexual orientation.  Melvin Nimer, president of the Utah Log Cabin Republicans, says GOP lawmakers are lending their support to these bills.

“We’re still in the writing process.  We have three or four Republican legislators who are helping us get them written.  No one has actual signed on because the bills haven’t been done yet, but I suspect the people that help us write us will also end up helping us sponsor it,” he told KCPW.

Utah Log Cabin Republicans President Melvin Nimer makes a unique argument for these protections, citing Utah’s constitutional ban on gay marriage:  “[T]he Utah Legislature did create a special class of people, and all we’re doing is asking that those people that the Utah Legislature singled out have some protections that they might not otherwise have because of that situation with Amendment 3.”

Scott McCoy, Utah’s only openly gay state senator, praised the “open-mindedness and basic sense of fairness toward the gay and lesbian community” of his Republican senate colleague Greg Bell, who has been chosen to become the state’s lieutenant governor by incoming Utah governor Gary Herbert.  The Advocate reports:

Bell, a land-use attorney who lives in Fruit Heights, outside Farmington, supported Amendment 3, the 2004 ballot initiative that banned same-sex marriages and equivalent unions in Utah. However, by the standards of deeply conservative Utah, his support for property contracts for same-sex couples and a domestic-partnership registry in Salt Lake City makes him politically moderate.