Below are selected links to local, national & international press coverage regarding Kate’s work:
“There is no amount of incremental change, and no amount of additional concessions that the church can make to extend an olive branch to women without changing that fundamental inequality.”
“What you’re asking me to do is to live inauthentically, and that’s not something I’m willing to do.”
“That’s classic language of an abusive relationship, where a person abusing and hurting you says that they’re doing it out of love.”
Utah’s state government is overwhelmingly male, and according to the Salt Lake Tribune, the march was organized to call for equality for women, minority groups, and LGBTQ people. “I’m sick and tired of men making laws about our bodies and our choices and our lives without consulting us,” Kate Kelly, the event’s organizer, told the paper.
Kelly, the former leader of Ordain Women who is studying to take the Utah bar exam next month, said the women had genuine reasons to march, as millions did Saturday in hundreds of marches around the world. She said women’s rights in Utah already are under assault in President Trump’s administration. He reportedly plans to slash 25 grant programs under the Violence Against Women Act, including funding for the Utah Prosecution Council that underwrites the work of Kelly’s mother, Donna Kelly, a sexual assault and domestic violence resource prosecutor.
“It’s an immediate attack on women,” Kelly said. “He’s had an immediate impact on the safety of women in Utah.”
Those setbacks are galvanizing.
“At least for the Utah group,” Kelly said, “that was the first march they’ve ever been to, the first protest they’ve been involved in, and the first time they’ve stood up for what they believe. It was the first time they’ve ever been engaged and involved, and that’s a positive sign for me.”
During the rally in the Rotunda, event organizer Kate Kelly said she had recently returned from Saturday’s women’s march in Washington, D.C. She had not slept in four days and had caught a cold, she said, and was feeling sick and tired, both literally and figuratively.
“But you know what else I’m sick and tired of?” Kelly said. “I’m sick and tired of men making laws about our bodies and our choices and our lives without consulting us.”
“I think Donald Trump is a symptom as opposed to the disease,” said Kate Kelly, who helped organize the march. “The disease is misogyny and anti-women rhetoric and hate speech.”
“The message we want to send, as a group of Utah women, is that we’re not the stereotype that everyone thinks we are. We are fighters. We are here to fight for our rights,” Kelly said.
“And it’s not just the usual suspects,” she says. “It’s people who’ve never been to a march or rally before; it’s people who are Republicans; it’s people who are Democrats; it’s women who are not OK with what’s being said about women.”
