Drew Howells
Election Information:
Party:
Democrat
District:
39
Office:
State House or Assembly
Contact Information:
howells4utah.com
Survey Responses:
S = Support
O = Oppose
NR = No Response
O = Oppose
NR = No Response
|
Life
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S | O | NR |
|---|---|---|---|
1.Protecting Life: Protecting the right to life of an unborn baby with a beating heart. |
X | ||
2.Taxpayer Funded Abortion: Allowing taxpayer dollars to fund organizations that provide abortion. |
X | ||
3.Physician-Assisted Suicide: Allowing voluntary physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients. |
X |
|
First Amendment
|
S | O | NR |
|---|---|---|---|
4.Conscience Rights for Professionals: Prohibiting the government from denying required licensure or certification to individuals because of their religious or political beliefs. |
X | ||
5.Conscience Rights for Faith-Based Organizations: Exempting faith-based organizations (e.g. adoption/foster care providers, private schools) from regulations that cause them to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs. |
X | ||
6.Prohibiting De-Banking/Insuring Based on Beliefs: Prohibiting financial institutions from shutting a customer’s bank account or canceling their insurance because of their religious or political views. |
X |
Candidate's Comments:
I strongly support freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, and freedom of political belief. Government should not deny someone a professional license or certification simply because officials disagree with that person’s faith or political views, and access to basic financial or insurance services should not depend on holding the “right” religious or political beliefs. Faith is also personally important to me. Before entering politics, I spent years serving as a pastor and worship leader. I understand the role faith can play in shaping our values, our communities, and how we care for one another. I also believe deeply that religious freedom comes with a responsibility not to use government power to force our own faith or theology onto someone else. I understand personally why those protections have to work both ways. I was adopted at birth through a Catholic social-service organization and placed with a Mormon family in the 1980s. There was certainly an opportunity for someone to decide that their own deeply held religious beliefs made my adoptive parents the “wrong” kind of family. Instead, my family was protected from that kind of religious discrimination, and I was given the opportunity to be raised by a wonderful family that loves me. I am profoundly grateful for that. I strongly support religious organizations that serve their communities. Churches and faith-based organizations do tremendous good every day, often reaching people government and other institutions fail to reach. But when an organization chooses to accept public taxpayer funding to provide a public service, I believe that service must be available fairly to everyone who qualifies for it, regardless of their religion, political beliefs, sexual orientation, family structure, or other protected status. Public money carries a public responsibility. I am reminded of Matthew 25: “Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?” Christ’s answer was clear: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” To me, that is a reminder that faith calls us to serve the least of these among us—not only the people who look like us, worship like us, believe like us, or live according to our own expectations, but people as they come to us, in whatever condition or circumstance they find themselves, when they are hungry, hurting, vulnerable, or in need of help or services. That is why I distinguish between protecting religious belief and granting blanket exemptions from laws and professional standards designed to protect other people. A professional license carries responsibilities along with it. That is especially important in healthcare and mental healthcare, where licensed professionals have ethical and professional duties to protect their patients from harm and to provide care consistent with accepted standards of their profession. When a provider’s deeply held religious beliefs conflict with established medical or mental health standards, their professional duty to the patient must come first. A license should never be denied merely because of someone’s faith, but once someone accepts the responsibility of caring for patients, personal theology cannot become a justification for causing harm, withholding required standards of care, or imposing those beliefs upon a patient. Financial institutions should likewise remain free to act for legitimate reasons involving fraud, illegal conduct, creditworthiness, underwriting, or actual risk— but not simply because they disapprove of a customer’s lawful religious or political views. I strongly support constitutionally required protections and reasonable accommodations for faith-based organizations. What I oppose is a blanket exemption allowing any organization to disregard otherwise applicable regulations simply by invoking a sincerely held religious belief. These questions require nuance, particularly when an organization receives taxpayer funding, performs a public function, or when an exemption would shift the burden onto someone else by denying them equal access to services or protections under the law. My principle is consistent: religious freedom should protect every person’s right to believe, worship, speak, and live according to their conscience. That protection mattered to my own family, and it matters deeply to me. But protecting religious liberty also means recognizing that our faith belongs to us. We are free to live by it, share it, and be guided by it. We are not entitled to use the power of government, a professional license, or public funds to impose it upon our neighbors or deny them the care, services, and equal treatment they are entitled to receive.
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Family
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S | O | NR |
|---|---|---|---|
7.Protecting Kids from Social Media: Requiring platforms to by default prevent underage accounts without parental permission, preserve parents' authority when access is allowed, and remove addictive design features and data exploitation from underage accounts. |
X | ||
8(a).Parental Rights: Allowing parents to obtain professional counseling for a child struggling with gender confusion to help the child find comfort with his or her biological sex. |
X | ||
8(b).Parental Rights: Protecting parents from losing custody of their child solely because they treat their child consistent with his or her biological sex. |
X |
Candidate's Comments:
I support protecting children, supporting families, and respecting the important role parents play in raising their children. I also believe these questions require considerably more nuance than a simple support-or-oppose answer allows. On technology, I support strong protections for minors against exploitative data collection, addictive design practices, and business models that deliberately monetize children’s attention and personal information. Parents should have meaningful tools to guide their children’s use of online platforms. At the same time, any age-verification or parental-consent system must be designed carefully so that protecting children does not become an excuse to create an intrusive digital identification or surveillance infrastructure for everyone. Protecting children’s privacy should not require sacrificing everyone else’s privacy. Regarding counseling, I absolutely support parents obtaining qualified professional mental healthcare for a child who is struggling with questions involving gender, identity, body image, family relationships, abuse, anxiety, depression, or any other issue. What I cannot support is counseling that begins with a predetermined conclusion that the professional’s job is to change who that young person is or force them toward a particular identity because of someone else’s religious or ideological beliefs. This is deeply personal for me. As a late teen, I was forced to participate in so-called conversion therapy. I know firsthand the damage that can be done when a vulnerable young person enters what is presented as a therapeutic environment only to be told that a fundamental part of who they are is broken and needs to be changed. That experience did not make me healthier. It caused harm that followed me long after those sessions ended. No young person should have to experience that under the guise of professional mental healthcare. Good therapy should create a safe space for honest exploration. It should allow a young person, their parents, and qualified professionals to understand what that individual is experiencing without the therapist imposing an ideological outcome in either direction. The goal should be the health, safety, dignity, and well-being of the young person— not forcing them to conform to a predetermined answer. I also do not believe parents should lose custody of their children solely because of their religious, philosophical, or personal beliefs about sex and gender. Government should never separate a family merely because officials disagree with a parent’s beliefs. Parents have fundamental rights and responsibilities in raising their children. But the word “solely” matters. Parental rights do not mean that actual abuse, neglect, psychological harm, or serious threats to a child’s health and safety must be ignored simply because the conduct is defended as a religious or political belief. Those determinations should be based on the individual circumstances, credible evidence, the child’s well-being, and established standards for protecting children; not political ideology from either side. My position is ultimately consistent: parents have rights, children have rights, and professional mental healthcare comes with a duty to do no harm. Families facing complicated questions deserve compassion, patience, qualified care, and room to work through those questions without politicians prescribing a single ideological answer for every child. Government’s role should be to protect children from actual harm, not to dictate the beliefs of parents or turn vulnerable young people into political battlegrounds.
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Education
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S | O | NR |
|---|---|---|---|
9.School Choice: Allowing the use of tax credits, vouchers, and/or education savings accounts to cover the cost of children attending the school of their parents’ choice, including private religious schools. |
X | ||
10.Free Speech at School: Protecting teachers and students from being forced to refer to a person by inaccurate pronouns that do not align with the person’s sex. |
X | ||
11.School Healthcare Disclosure to Parents: Requiring schools to inform parents of any mental, physical, or emotional health information and treatment that a child is receiving at school. |
X | ||
12.Transparency in School Curriculum & Activities: Giving parents access to the curriculum, presentations, and activities that their children are learning in school and allowing them to opt their children out of school extra-curricular activities, presentations, or specific lessons to which the parents object. |
X |
Candidate's Comments:
I believe parents should be deeply involved in their children’s education. They should know what their children are being taught, have meaningful access to curriculum and instructional materials, be able to ask questions, offer their own perspective, and have reasonable opportunities to opt their children out of particular extracurricular activities or narrowly defined instruction when appropriate. What I do not support is turning parental involvement into a system where one parent’s objection determines what every other child is allowed to learn, or where an unlimited right to “opt out” eventually allows students to bypass core education simply because a subject challenges a family’s worldview. Exposure to different cultures, communities, histories, identities, and beliefs is not a threat to a person’s religious paradigm. In many cases, I believe it strengthens faith by requiring us to understand what we actually believe and why. Knowledge is not indoctrination, and understanding someone else is not the same thing as agreeing with them. An unlimited opt-out standard creates a difficult slippery slope. One family might object to their high school student learning about LGBTQ Americans and their role in the broader history of civil rights. Another might object to lessons about Manifest Destiny or uncomfortable chapters of American history. Another might object on religious grounds to evolution, geology, or established scientific principles. At some point, we have to recognize that education necessarily exposes students to ideas, facts, histories, and people they may not encounter at home. We should not fear knowledge. Parents should absolutely have the opportunity to be involved, to discuss what their children are learning, and to offer the perspective of their own faith, values, and family traditions. That is part of parenting. But education should also prepare young people to live in the world as it actually exists; a pluralistic society filled with people who believe differently, worship differently, love differently, and experience life differently. That same principle shapes my opposition to school vouchers. Parents absolutely have the right to choose private or religious education for their children, but I do not believe we should divert public education dollars away from public schools that have an obligation to educate every child who walks through their doors. Private schools can choose whom they admit and operate under different standards and accountability requirements. Public schools cannot. Public dollars should come with public accountability, transparency, and a responsibility to serve the entire public. I also reject the framing of respectful pronoun use as being “forced” to use something “inaccurate.” Schools bring together thousands of people with different religions, identities, backgrounds, and beliefs. We do not have to agree on everything to treat one another with basic dignity and respect. Calling someone by the name or pronouns they use is, to me, an ordinary act of human courtesy— not an endorsement of an ideology or a requirement that someone abandon their faith. I strongly support parental involvement in a child’s physical, mental, and emotional healthcare. But I cannot support an absolute requirement that schools disclose “any” information under every circumstance. That word matters. There can be situations involving abuse, neglect, a young person in crisis, or a student seeking help because they do not feel safe at home where automatic disclosure could create additional danger. Schools and licensed professionals should follow appropriate legal, ethical, and professional standards, with the safety and well-being of the child always the first part of the equation. Ultimately, I trust parents enough to let them make choices for their own children. I trust teachers enough to teach. I trust librarians enough to maintain libraries. And I trust other parents enough to make different choices for their families than I might make for mine. We live in a pluralistic society. Learning how to understand one another and see each other as human beings is part of preparing young people to participate in that society. We should not teach children that people who are different are threats to be separated from, silenced, or erased. And we certainly should not teach them that another person’s humanity becomes something we get to negotiate simply because we disagree with them. That approach does not serve LGBTQ students, religious students, or anyone else. In fact, I believe people of faith have just as much to gain from a society that teaches mutual understanding and protects pluralism. Religious liberty itself depends on our willingness to live alongside people whose beliefs are different from our own. Public education belongs to all of us. Its job is not to make every family believe the same things. Its job is to give every child the knowledge, critical thinking skills, and opportunity they need to understand the world around them and build their own future.
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Health and Welfare
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S | O | NR |
|---|---|---|---|
13.Medical Rights of Conscience: Protecting health care workers from losing their jobs if they decline to participate in a procedure or treatment that violates their personal beliefs and conscience. |
X | ||
14.Women’s Privacy: Preventing males who identify as female from entering sex-separated spaces intended for females, such as showers, locker rooms, bathrooms, dormitories, women’s shelters, prisons, etc. |
X | ||
15.Protecting Pregnancy Centers: Ensuring pregnancy centers that provide life-affirming support to women and their families are not targeted or penalized by government officials. |
X |
Candidate's Comments:
My answers are grounded in a consistent principle: deeply personal healthcare decisions belong first with the individual, informed by their unique circumstances and made in consultation with the people they trust. That may include their physician, their family, and, for people of faith, their clergy or religious leaders. Government should respect that process rather than replace it with a blanket prohibition. Pregnancy, reproductive healthcare, terminal illness, and end-of-life decisions involve enormous medical, ethical, spiritual, and personal complexity. No two circumstances are exactly the same, and rigid laws written to cover every possible situation often create unintended consequences and make already difficult moments even harder. I oppose using early fetal cardiac activity as a government-imposed cutoff that removes a patient’s ability to make decisions about a pregnancy. I support public funding for healthcare organizations that provide comprehensive reproductive healthcare, including abortion services where lawful; an organization should not lose funding for the full range of healthcare it provides simply because some object to one legal service. I also support carefully regulated medical aid in dying for competent, terminally ill adults who voluntarily choose it, with strong safeguards against coercion and abuse. For me, these questions ultimately come down to human dignity, informed consent, religious freedom, medical autonomy, and personal conscience. People should be free to seek the counsel of their faith and live according to their own deeply held beliefs. But those beliefs should guide their own decisions, not be imposed by government as a single answer for every person facing profoundly different circumstances.