Gay-rights tour to stop at 2 Y. sites

PROVO — The woman who organized the gay and lesbian march at Brigham Young University last year is singling out BYU and BYU-Idaho as two of the "darkest" places on her group's upcoming tour.

"My confession is this: I have a Mormon fetish," Soulforce Equality Ride organizer Haven Herrin wrote in Lavendar, billed as Minnesota's Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender magazine. "As someone who works to end religion-based bigotry, I have a special place in my life for Mormons because they, by and large, exist in the most concentrated petri dish of anti-gay religious rhetoric and its fallout — Utah."

Soulforce is adding BYU-Idaho to an expanded tour that now includes two buses visiting different campuses, 32 religious colleges and universities in all.

The Equality Ride's stop at BYU last April resulted in 29 arrests. This year's tour is scheduled to visit Provo on March 21 and 22 and Rexburg, Idaho, on April 16 and 17.

This time the Riders hope to avoid arrests, said Matthew Kulisch, a returned LDS missionary who was a BYU student last year when he announced he was gay the day before he was arrested in the Soulforce protest.

Kulisch, now a University of Utah student, is one of four Utahns on this year's Equality Ride. "I believe in being anxiously engaged in a good cause," he said.

Herrin made the case in her article that concentrating on BYU and BYU-Idaho gives the Equality Riders the best cost-benefit ratio.

"Where is it the darkest? Go there," she wrote. "At that place will be all the controversy you need to generate media attention."

Arrests and publicity accompanied Soulforce's 2006 19-stop, 51-day tour, with arrests, in addition to BYU, at Regent University and Liberty University in Virginia and the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

BYU has again told Soulforce that the university will not allow protests on campus. Equality Riders did engage in one-on-one conversations with students on campus last year, but five were arrested when they began to talk to groups.

"As a private university, we do not allow any organization to use our campus as their own public forum," BYU spokeswoman Carri Jenkins said. "There certainly are places that are not private that allow for that type of activity. We are upholding our policies and procedures, which are in place for all organizations. We're not going to change our policies and procedures to accommodate a particular organization.

"We did see last year that they made it very clear that their reason for being here was being arrested," Jenkins said. "They told us that. They told media that."