Environmental activist Tim DeChristopher had some harsh words for Rep. Jim Matheson as he prepares to leave Utah to attend school on the East Coast.
Salt Lake Magazine’s Glen Warchol says DeChristopher told a farewell gathering that he would return to Utah if “progressives get rid of Jim Matheson.”
He sees Democrat Matheson’s re-elections as proof that Utah’s progressives (particularly the would-be progressive Democratic Party) are trapped in a cycle of “shame, fear and short-term thinking.” They have somehow become convinced that progressive values are something for which they should ashamed.
“Nothing represents that more than the re-election of Jim Matheson,” DeChristopher told the Unitarians who have provided him a staunch support group through his trial and incarceration. “Nobody wants to be part of a movement like that.”
Matheson, he argues, has voted with Utah’s conservative Republicans on virtually every important issue. In fact, DeChristopher says, the only time Matheson departed from the Utah right-wing line was to vote in support of the National Security Agency’s snooping on American citizens. Utah’s Republican congressmen, at least, voted to end the program’s invasion of the privacy of Americans not suspected of a crime.
