Park City • A massive snowstorm and snarled traffic couldn’t shut down the Respect Rally — not with Jane Fonda, Gloria Allred and others firing up the crowd.
“Everything is at stake,” Fonda told about 1,000 people who gathered in City Park on Saturday. “We’ve got to give it all we’ve got. Time is up!”
Fonda urged the crowd to get involved in grass-roots activism to end Republican majorities in Congress and to install progressive leadership at the local level.
Fonda, 80, tied the current #MeToo movement of women standing up to men’s sexual misconduct to her long-standing advocacy of women’s rights. “When we are equal, we are not abused,” she said.
Allred, the celebrity attorney who has represented women who accused such men as Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump of sexual misconduct, spurred the crowd to recite a chant of “resist, insist, persist, elect.”
“We will not be silenced,” Allred said. “We have reached the breaking point. We have reached the tipping point.”
Allred also had a message for Utah legislators: “We need a hearing for the ERA in Utah,” she said, arguing that 36 states have already passed the Equal Rights Amendment, and only two more are needed to ratify it.
Saturday’s rally was organized to emulate the Women’s March on Park City, which drew 8,000 people last year to protest Trump’s inauguration, as part of a national network of marches that brought out millions of protesters.
The Park City rally was just one of many across the country Saturday to protest Trump’s policies and show support of the #MeToo movement. A similar march in Ogden drew about 200 people.
The Respect Rally coincided with the Sundance Film Festival and drew an array of artists and performers connected to festival films.
People onstage and in the crowd showed support for women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the environment and the free press.
Opposition to Trump inspired the sign-makers in the crowd Saturday. Messages included “Get off the greens and lead,” “Free Melania” and “I [heart] Mueller” (referring to special counsel Robert Mueller, who is running an investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia).
Others took a more playful attitude. One woman revved up the crowd by holding up an album cover from one of Fonda’s ’80s workout regimens.
Actor Tessa Thompson, one of the stars of “Thor: Ragnarok” and the first speaker Saturday, recalled last year’s protests against “a person in power who was primed in every which way to abuse it.” Thompson noted that the protests brought together people of different ethnic and gender groups, supporting different causes, but represented “the one vital commonality between us all: Our humanity.”
Rapper and actor Common told the crowd about a day when he had a thought: “What would it be like if women took over the world?” He then reeled off a couple of verses of a song he wrote based on that notion.
Common also extolled the #MeToo movement and the Time’s Up campaign defending women in all walks of life. “This movement is at its core a practice of a love greater than us,” Common said. “This love fuels movements.”
Other speakers included actors Nick Offerman and Maria Bello, writer Lena Waithe, documentary filmmaker Bonni Cohen (who co-directed “An Inconvenient Sequel,” which premiered at Sundance last year), Lakota activist Sage Trudell and Princess Firyan of Jordan. There were music and performances from actor/singer Anthony Ramos, poet Sarah Kaye, a Ute Indian drum circle, and the California band Side Deal, made up of members of Train, Sugar Ray and Pawn Shop Kings.
Utah politicians also joined the rally. U.S. Senate candidate Jenny Wilson told stories about Martha Hughes Cannon, the Utah senator who was the first woman elected to a state legislature. And Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski mocked the notion that defying Trump would get her city in trouble.
“It takes more than a tweet to scare this lesbian mayor,” Biskupski said.
