Something happened in the Salt Lake Police Department that meant a lot to me this year. 3 of my friends sent me screenshots of the change. I had to read it twice to believe it. Has kinda made me emotional the last few hours. I wanted to write my thoughts.
The department changed a policy and will have new procedure and training on how to handle and treat people of faith who request a position change for a religious accommodation.
To this day many people still ask me why I didn’t bring a law suit on the city. I can’t always explain it, even to myself, other than I just didn’t feel right about it. Every time I prayed for guidance, litigation felt like a dark hole. However, every time I felt to tell my story publicly, instead instead of suing, I felt hope and light. I felt that by telling my story I could one day help someone who believes how I believe. Also for someone who believes something entirely different than I do. It goes all ways. That’s the First Amendment. The free exercise of religion.
When you litigate, the courts can silence you for years. And most of the time when you settle a case, silence is part of the deal. I know several of my officers friends from the SLCPD who are still in litigation with the city from over seven years ago and counting. And the harder each party fights, the more resistant each party gets on the issue. Nothing changes. And ultimately who really loses if you “win”? The tax payers and officers pay will suffer. Not the city. They will just take it from someone else. That’s the truth.
I usually don’t like to give any amount of credit to upper city administrators, because I overall don’t trust how they operate, and usually lack integrity once the going gets tough to do the right thing, but in this case yesterday, I give them credit. Thank you, Chief Brown and Chief Doubt, and whoever else made this change possible. They aren’t the ones who took my badge years ago, but they’ve done the right thing here. Some say “It’s too late” but to me, especially with this issue, it’s never too late.
M. J. Sobran once said that, “A religious conviction is now a second-class conviction, expected to step deferentially to the back of the secular bus, and not to get uppity about it.”
Well, my message is that we sometimes we need to get uppity about it. Sometimes annoyingly uppity if we have to. And yes, looking back we can always see how we could have gone about things differently. At least for me. Go about it more diplomatic; go about it without offending, or going about it without ruffling feathers, etc. But my point is that we need to go about it. We need to go about it to keep the freedom we still have. And with conviction. If we don’t go about it, we will lose it. I believe times are only going to get tougher with this particulate issue regarding religious liberty. We have to stand up when we are being forced down with fear and silence. Even if we lose our career.
Because at the end of the day if we can’t have religious liberty or some type of personal conviction, as Maxwell said, what matter of men and women are we to be anyway? There’s no more “Plymouth Rocks” for future pilgrims to flee to. This is it. And if we lose it in America, there’s nowhere else to go.
In this country we are all different and believe differently. That’s the beauty of how America was to be built. And sometimes that difference means disagreeing with each other. I believe you can still disagree with each other and love all at the same time. It’s possible.
Thanks again to everyone who has supported me and my family.
Love you all.
(Here’s the video news interview when I finally told my side of the story) I can’t believe it’s been over 4 years
https://www.ksl.com/?sid=33605041 <—- Story Here
