Booze Battle Brewing in Utah

Dead Goat Saloon owner and attorney Daniel Darger is looking for recruits in his war against what he calls Utah’s liquor-law lunacy.

On his Web site,https://www.slcgetalife.com, potential customers get a tutorial on how they can pay just $15 in processing fees for a single membership card that will get them into six bars.

It’s an artful dodge timed to help club owners make hay during the upcoming Winter Olympics and, if it works, it could make it a little easier for Utah residents to get a drink in a state whose dominant Mormon culture shuns alcohol.

The timing could induce the state’s alcohol regulators to look aside until after the games, which in turn could make action against Darger’s plan more difficult.

Utah law requires full-service bars to sell individual annual memberships of at least $12 before a person can get a drink. It doesn’t specifically address the legality of Darger’s approach--probably because no one has ever tried it.

That doesn’t bother Darger a bit. Nor does the prospect of regulatory scrutiny. A compliance officer has expressed “concern.”

“I’m a lawyer. I can read the statutes. It’s a monkey court over there,” said Darger, a Utah native who has owned his bar for five years. “The commission just wants its pound of flesh. If they want to take me to the wall, I’m ready to go.”

Darger has five other bar owners ready to join him and more leaning his way, evidence of increasing restiveness among Salt Lake City liquor licensees.

Greg Schirf’s guerrilla actions against the state’s liquor laws have been especially creative, with humor his best weapon.

As managing partner of the Utah Brewers Cooperative and owner of Wasatch Brewery, Schirf doesn’t have to deal with many of the laws the club owners do. He says he’s been treated fairly by regulators.

Yet the Utah liquor commission’s interpretation of state laws with their Mormon overtones drive him crazy.

“Occasionally, I feel I have to exercise my minority complex,” said Schirf, a liberal Catholic from Wisconsin who came to ski in Park City in 1974 and never left.

A year ago, he decided to turn years of droll bar talk into an ad campaign poking fun at the local culture’s sensitive underbelly.

Billboards touted beer as “Utah’s Other Local Religion” and urged customers to “Baptize Your Taste Buds.” Radio ads tweaked the Mormon church’s proselytizing, with Elders “Rulon” and “Heber” declaring themselves on a “different kind of mission.”

Schirf’s sales swelled as his ads grew edgier, lampooning Utah’s prudishness and history of polygamy. A radio spot for Polygamy Porter, after several double-entendres, asks “Why have just one?” Another ad, on a billboard, urged customers to “take some home for the wives.”

The other side fired back.

Reagan Outdoor Advertising, which had a contract with Schirf, yanked the ad. Reagan President Dewey Reagan said the company didn’t want to be associated in any way with polygamy.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints once sanctioned the practice but discarded it in 1890 and now excommunicates polygamists. Many Utah residents, including Gov. Mike Leavitt, have polygamist ancestors.

Reagan denied that politics played a part in his company’s decision. “It’s simply a business decision,” he said. “Greg knows his market, and we know ours.”

But Schirf found the timing peculiar. At a liquor commission hearing during which rules forbidding ads with religious overtones or aimed at minors were announced, he asked whether his ads would pass muster.

“I asked, ‘Is polygamy considered a religious theme? And second, since polygamists marry underage girls, is this going to be targeting minors?’ ”

The next day, Reagan nixed the billboards.

“People who have the same minority complex I do consider us their spokesmen,” Schirf said. “There’s not a state that remotely comes close to the control Mormons have in Utah. When’s the last time we had a governor or senator who wasn’t a Mormon?”

That’s precisely the point people who sell liquor ought to heed, said Kent Knowley, owner of the bar Port O’Call and president of the Utah Hospitality Assn., a lobbying group for clubs and restaurants.

“We know who we’ve got to work with,” Knowley said. “You can’t fight them because they’re the majority, the predominant culture.”

The powerful Mormon “predominant culture” continues to fume over the state’s humiliation at the hands of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. On July 24--Utah’s holiday celebrating the Mormon pioneers’ arrival in the Salt Lake Valley--the court struck down the last vestiges of the state’s ban on liquor advertising.

In its review of a 1996 case, the court found the state’s liquor advertising laws “irrational” and probably unconstitutional.

In the heat of the moment, one state lawmaker vowed to find a way to outlaw liquor advertising “whether it’s constitutional or not.” The Mormon church weighed in with eight pages of comments directed to the liquor commission on “the terrible impact of alcohol abuse on society.”

The imbroglio intensified last month when the Utah chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union sued the commission for violating the state’s open meetings law. Its decision to ban religiously themed advertising came about through a series of telephone calls, not a public meeting.

The commission then admitted that it had made such illegal decisions 20 times during the past decade, and in a public meeting overturned the disputed rule.

Darger didn’t celebrate the victory. He hasn’t even bothered to look at the new advertising laws. “I’m sure they’ll be as stupid as the old ones,” he said. “That’s why we’re in a rebellious mood. It’s like the Boston Tea Party.”

But Knowley predicted that by the time the Legislature meets in January, just before the Olympics, everyone will have had time to simmer down.

“We’ve kind of agreed to agree that no one from either side is going to run liquor legislation this year,” he said.