Although Jon Stewart and I see politics very differently, I’ve always found him smart, funny and exceptionally good at exposing hypocrisy. However, in his recent interview with Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, he got something important wrong: the role contempt should play in our society. Stewart scoffed at Cox’s argument that Americans need to reject contempt while continuing to vigorously disagree, and made the case that some people deserve our contempt.
Of course, some things deserve condemnation. Evil should be called evil. Injustice should be fought. Certain ideas can be dangerous. Even an individual’s conduct can be contemptible. But that is different from treating a person who holds a different view with contempt. This distinction is critically important in American politics today. An idea is not a person, and we can condemn one another without dehumanizing the other.
One of the best examples of this principle is the Utah Compromise. Yet in discussing it, Stewart fundamentally mischaracterized what the compromise accomplished and the larger lesson it offered.
You have to remember how deeply divided Utah was in 2015 over same-sex marriage, religious freedom and legal protections for LGBTQ+ Utahns. There were deeply held beliefs on all sides. LGBTQ+ Utahns believed the law lacked protections against employment and housing discrimination, while religious leaders feared that judicial activism and rapidly changing cultural norms could force churches and people of faith to act contrary to their deeply held beliefs. These concerns did not disappear when the two groups sat down together. Instead, people who profoundly disagreed decided to take one another’s concerns seriously.
What were the results of these discussions? The Legislature added protections for sexual orientation to Utah’s employment and housing nondiscrimination laws, while also enacting meaningful protections for religious institutions and religious expression. Without abandoning their core beliefs, each side gained protections that deeply mattered to them.
Reflecting on the Utah Compromise, Stewart argued that it essentially required gay Utahns to “bargain for their humanity.” Though this is a powerful line, it fundamentally misrepresents the process and the result.
I’m not arguing that there wasn’t a power struggle in negotiating the Utah Compromise. Of course there was. However, the existence of a power struggle doesn’t make the compromise illegitimate. It is precisely what makes compromise necessary. Consider the alternative: One side could have said, “We have the votes. You are attacking our faith and your concerns do not deserve to be heard.” The other could have responded, “The courts are on our side. You are bigots, and your concerns do not deserve to be heard.”
Instead, each side said something much harder. They said, “I believe you are wrong about some things that matter deeply, but I recognize that you have legitimate interests that deserve protection too.” That is not weakness; it is pluralism. And it is the only way that a nation of 340 million very different people can govern itself.
I have seen this firsthand in my own service in the Utah Legislature. We have real, significant disagreements on Capitol Hill. Republicans and Democrats regularly vote against one another, and even members of the same party regularly disagree with one another. We amend bills, kill bills and sometimes spend years fighting over the same issue. Yet something remarkable happens here — we keep working together. In fact, most bills pass the legislature with bipartisan support.
Utah is far from perfect. But I believe our state should be a model for a different way of doing politics, the Utah Way: conviction without dehumanization, disagreement without hatred and compromise without surrendering principle.
We have seen this principle work throughout American history. Martin Luther King Jr. did not ask Americans to disagree less vigorously about segregation, but demanded change while rejecting the idea that fighting injustice required hatred of the people perpetuating it.
Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg disagreed over some of the most consequential constitutional questions imaginable. Yet they were close friends. Justice Ginsburg even acknowledged that Justice Scalia’s dissents made her own opinions better by forcing her to confront arguments she might otherwise have overlooked.
Contempt says you are not merely wrong but morally beneath me. Why bother negotiating, or even asking what brought them to that stance, when you can just wait for your side to get the votes and steamroll them?
There is another important reason this matters. Neither side is going anywhere. Utah isn’t about to run out of conservatives, and progressives aren’t packing up and vanishing overnight. We’re still sharing the same grocery aisles, school pickup lines and neighborhood streets come Monday morning.
So, we can spend the next generation trying to accumulate enough power to punish the people we dislike. Or we can learn to live together without pretending our differences don’t matter.
Stewart is right that confronting injustice takes guts. Where he misses the mark is thinking contempt gives you an edge. It doesn’t; it just blinds you to the people you eventually have to live with. The Utah Compromise didn’t pretend our ideological divides were trivial. It proved that deeply opposed views don’t have to turn neighbors into enemies to get durable work done. That isn’t weak compromise; it’s the only way self-government actually survives.
America needs more of that. Utah should keep leading the way.