BLUE IN THE REDDEST STATE

The booming tenor of the announcer's voice rose above the singing of a tabernacle choir, jarring me from my afternoon nap. "Get ready... for America's original gridiron holy war... the BYU Cougars invade Salt Lake City to take on the undefeated University of Utah Utes!" Cannons fired and fireworks burst as red-and-blue football squads sprinted onto the field.

Groggy and bewildered, I snapped off the TV. Must have been dreaming. Just close your eyes and float back into orbit, I told myself. But it wasn't a dream. It was a commercial. Real life in Salt Lake City.

Mormons know it as Zion, the chosen place of a chosen people. For the rest of us, Salt Lake is just a nice place to live. Two parallel worlds. We share restaurants, pass each other on the hiking trails in City Creek Park, stare out at the same majestic sunsets above the Wasatch Mountains. Much like the rest of the country, although we've been aware of the divide for longer.

The split is close to 50-50 within Salt Lake County, but Mormons make up a vast majority of the state and dominate public offices. Their conservative cultural values permeate all facets of society. Utah was the first state government to appoint a porn czar. Contraception is frowned upon. Nor can you simply walk into a bar in Utah; liquor laws permit only social clubs that charge a membership fee to serve alcohol. Utah has the highest per capita consumption of Jell-O--and anti-depressants--in the country.

For someone like me, who believes that a glass of wine is no big deal, that homosexuality is not a choice and that abortion should remain one, life can feel a bit blue at times. Coffee was just a drink with sugar before I came to Salt Lake. But since coffee is forbidden among Mormons, the act of enjoying a cup in public reflects far more than your desire to perk up a bit. It denotes which world you live in.

Since I spent much of this year in Paris, at the other extreme of the cultural spectrum, part of me feels like an expatriate here--a sentiment that after the latest election many denizens of Blue States in America seem to share. There's a bond among us non-Mormons, the kinship of aliens living on the fringe of a society that we've come to accept but that may never truly accept us. We laugh at the same jokes during R-rated comedies at the Broadway Theater, take day trips to the Moab Desert in the summer and to Snowbird in the winter and commiserate about how hard it is to quit smoking over a pack of Camels. We also believe ourselves to be on the side of good.