It's no surprise that Utah is trying to take our Congressional seat-it's a state that steals things.
If not, explain to me why the state bird of Utah is the California seagull.
Actually, there's a story there. The Mormon settlers were being plagued by locusts in 1848. The nasty little critters were gobbling up all the crops until a huge flock of seagulls added another link to the food chain. Orson Whitney, Mormon bishop, poet and chancellor of the University of Utah, wrote that all day long the gulls "gorged themselves, and when full, disgorged and feasted again, the white gulls upon the black crickets, list hosts of heaven and hell contending, until the pests were vanquished and the people were saved."
The symbolism was awfully convenient for a people so persecuted that they had to flee to somewhere as sand-blasted as Utah. The gulls started to draw the kind of reverence normally reserved for slightly more traditional religious figures, but they didn't stick around to bask in the adulation. After finishing off the crickets, Whitney says, the California seagulls returned "to the lake islands whence they came."
The state bird, it seems, was just vacationing.
This hasn't deterred Utah from erecting monuments in memory of the gulls. Downtown Salt Lake City is full of obelisks with pointy-beaked birds perched on top. There are more stone seagulls in this town than there are overfed pigeons in New York.
Utah is clearly a state that cares deeply about its animal representatives. Apparently, it cares about its human ones, too, and therein lies the problem. Gov. Mike Leavitt and the Utah Congressmen have sued the U.S. Census Bureau for not counting as residents more than 14,000 Mormon missionaries who, like the gulls, were swooping down on foreign lands to eradicate sin. The bureau, although it does count federal employees and military personnel working overseas, does not count private citizens living abroad. This time it made a difference. Without its missionaries, Utah fell 856 people short of a new seat in Congress, and North Carolina got the coveted new spot instead. But Utah felt about its missionaries much like it felt about its California seagulls-once a Utah resident, always a Utah resident (even if he no longer resides in Utah).
Now, let's first consider some ways to remedy this injustice. We could take Utah's side without thinking through its claims and force North Carolina to hand over the seat without doing any more counting.
Um, no. Let's try again. We could give Utah the seat after counting every single American living overseas, right down to the last missionary going door-to-door. This shouldn't be too difficult. Surely the feds can do a large recount without resorting to counting on their fingers, especially when important matters of government representation come down to sums in the three digits.
No again. Now, let's consider some reasons we might be better off ignoring the whole mess and hoping it goes away. North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper says Utah is trying to change the census rules ex post facto, and he's right-the bureau has never counted private citizens living overseas. Funny that the Utah delegation has never gotten up in arms about this before.
You could argue that the Census rules are dumb and should be changed-that where you legally reside, not where you actually live, should determine where you're counted. As the system's designed now, the Census counts people in their day-to-day residence. That's why I fill out my census form here in North Carolina, not in Georgia, where my parents live-and where I'm a citizen. It's also why, if I were living overseas for two years, I wouldn't fill one out at all. There's no such thing as an absentee ballot for the Census.
The reason the Census only counts people actually living in America is so it can determine how many constituents benefit from government funding. If Orrin Hatch scores a pork-barrel highway project, for instance, the government can logically say it helped all the Utans... Utes... Utah residents who use the highway. But no amount of road construction will help 14,000 missionaries living 14,000 miles away.
Maybe this is an argument for why we should not count all those federal employees living outside of the country, but it certainly isn't an argument in favor of counting those private citizens who are abroad. And even if you disagree with it, there's no way of getting around the fact that Utah is trying to change the rules of the game after SportsCenter's already flashed the final score.
Unfortunately, the facts are no obstacle for the government of Utah. Its lawsuit smells an awful lot like a rat. Or perhaps a seagull.
Mary Carmichael is a Trinity senior and executive editor of The Chronicle.
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