With the opening of the 2025 Utah legislative session, we have seen a distinct paradigm shift in Utah politics. In Gov. Spencer Cox’s State of the State address, he mentioned a multitude of times that we need to focus on bread-and-butter issues like housing, resources and growth. But those issues, which I agree are important, are being ignored for issues that seem asinine and directly hurt my future and desire to settle and raise a family in the Beehive State.
It has become increasingly clear to me that the Utah Republican Party does not care about our state’s young people — nor the future of this state.
I lived in Utah up until I went to college. I have always wanted to raise a family in this state — and live in a state that has clean air, a fair representative government and reasonably affordable housing. Yet the Utah Republican party chooses to focus on the absurdity of the “culture wars.”
Republicans have chosen to legislate on issues that affect the youth of this state in negative ways. Instead of cleaning our air, they care more about what bathroom a person uses. Instead of incentivizing affordable housing, they draw up the most hollow of measures that “kindly” ask developers — who happen to make up more than a third of the Legislature — to make more affordable housing instead of actually incentivizing it. Meanwhile, the Great Salt Lake is actively dying. They would rather enact legislation that actively hurts those most vulnerable in society, including transgender Utahns, than focus on issues that affect all of us.
The Republican Party doing this shows just how little they care about the actual issues facing the youth of Utah. They are instead trying to make headlines and fall in line with the extremist MAGA portions of the party. The supposed “Utah Way” of measured growth and compromise is dead. We have removed our uniqueness and have fallen in the same camp as other extremist Republican parties in other states. What young people like me want is the opposite of what we’re getting from Republican leaders.
Instead of focusing on using taxpayer money to sue the federal government for land that was never the state of Utah’s, they should focus on reducing red-tape for high density housing. And they must end the gerrymandering they have imposed and give everyone in the state of Utah a fair and equal voice. Utah also deserves a world class education system for the purpose of raising up and empowering young people. Yet Republicans want to cut programs that they deem “low ROI” and ban collective bargaining of public employees, including teachers unions, so they can fully control educational institutions. They do all of this in the name of ending “indoctrination” in the public education system, yet it seems that’s exactly what they want to do: Make mindless workers instead of thinkers.
The Republican party is supposedly the party of limited and small government. Yet ours in Utah has chosen to focus on ridiculous, attention-grabbing issues. Acting immature and expanding government regulation shows just how far they have fallen from some of their key tenets. They do not care if I can afford a house, nor that my generation will suffer the most due to the ecological collapse of the Great Salt Lake. Quite simply, Republicans have abandoned the youth of Utah.
(Jack Clark) Jack Clark was born in Salt Lake City Utah and raised in Davis County.
Jack Clark was born in Salt Lake City and raised in Davis County. He is currently studying geology at Brigham Young University-Idaho. A lover of the arts and the outdoors, he enjoys the landscape and culture of this great state.
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