681: Stephen Urquhart - Former Utah State Senator on LDS Church Influence in the Utah Legislature Pt. 2

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 5.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2016

⏱️ 112 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Stephen Urquhart was raised in Houston, Texas, where he and his family converted to the LDS church after the suicide of his older brother. After serving an LDS mission in Brazil, Steve married Sara Stanley and graduated from BYU Law School -- ultimately settling in St. George, Utah.

After developing a successful law career in St. George, Stephen served for 16 years in the Utah State Legislature, representing Washington County. In total, Stephen served 8 years in the Utah House of Representatives, and 8 years in the Utah Senate.

During this vast legislative career, Stephen championed legislation on several issues crucial to Utahns, including: public land use, water rights, death penalty, increasing citizen access to legal services, numerous initiatives to improve K-12 and higher education in Utah, and most recently -- anti-discrimination and hate crimes legislation (LGBT), as well as the legalization of medical marijuana.

In this two-part episode, Stephen discusses:

Part 1: His early years in the LDS Church, and his legal and legislative careers in Utah.
Part 2: His experiences and reflections on the powerful influence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints on the Utah legislative process, and his loss of LDS faith after witnessing the negative impact of LDS LGBT policies on several people close to him.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
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0:16.3	the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you.
0:21.3	To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today at
0:26.6	MormonStories.org.
0:27.6	Hello and welcome back to Mormon Stories Podcast.
0:33.4	I'm your host John DeLin.
0:35.1	We're now in part two of my interview with Steve Irkhardt.
0:38.7	Steve in part one that we just finished.
0:42.5	Steve talked about growing up in Houston, but eventually serving a mission going to be
0:48.8	a law school, becoming an attorney in St. George, and eventually serving 16 years in the
0:55.2	Utah State Legislature, eight years in the House, eight years in the Senate, doing a
0:59.7	lot of work with public lands, doing a lot of work for education in the state of Utah.
1:06.0	For me, it was a really fascinating hour.
1:08.5	It's certainly something we haven't ever covered on Mormon Stories before, and it's just
1:12.5	interesting to see kind of how state politics work.
1:17.1	We don't really think a lot about state and local government.
1:20.5	We obsess about the federal government and sometimes I think, and Steve you may agree with
1:24.5	because sometimes I think it's the local government that matters most.
1:28.0	Anyway, now we're going to jump to kind of what many of you will think is the meaty and
1:32.2	the interesting stuff.
	...

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