A kabuki press conference at the Utah statehouse?  That's how one journalist described the scene last Monday when members of Patriots for a Moral Utah arrived at the capitol in Salt Lake City with a "Fair Solution Initiative" to solve the state's "homosexual problem." In front of rolling cameras, a handful of reporters and some protesters, the Patriots introduced their petition campaign that would force Utah's gays into reparative therapy or give them the choice of being shipped out to San Francisco, Portland, New York and other "homosexual havens."

As a rationale for such draconian action, the group's spokeswoman, "professional housewife" Nora Young, delivered a mash-up speech blending elements of natural law theory, states rights politics, Mormon Zionism and old-school proclamations about decency and morality seemingly stolen from the Eagle Forum playbook. Standing next to Young was Paul Jackson, a self-identified Tea Partier and the group's public relations manager, who the day before had emailed a press release announcing the Patriots' petition drive and kick-off news conference.

Trouble was, the whole shebang was a prank, as Troy Williams announced on his Queer Gnosis website. The clue to those with ears to hear? It might have been Young's response to a reporter's question: No, she didn't hate homosexuals, but "I love my country more than my hairdresser."

While the Salt Lake Tribune ignored the story altogether, other local media outlets, including the ABC affiliate, hastily declared the event a hoax. As if we needed another reminder, the Utah stunt told us something about the viral nature of the Internet and its role in framing (fanning?) controversy. The websites of mainstream LGBT organizations like HRC and NGLTF never mentioned it – nor did Christian Right sites such as the Family Research Council. But word of the Salt Lake new conference zoomed through the blogosphere. Joe.My.God, a popular LGBT blog, jumped on the story, followed soon after by The Daily Kos. Linking to a note about the event in Q Salt Lake blog, someone asked in an on-line forum, "Anyone still deny the gay holocaust is underway??"

City Weekly's Jesse Fruhwirth, suspecting he was being punked, was probably the first to recognize the "news conference" as a spoof, tweeting from the scene: "The forced relocation of homos thing is a joke." Appalled that the pranksters might have expected him to play along just because he reported for what was once called "the alternative press," Fruhwirth defended the journalist's bottom line: "Truth first, truth last, truth truth truth. I don't play along with jokes."

Was the event a hoax? A joke? All these things, and something more?

It's understandably tough for commercial media to interpret satirical romps like the guerrilla theater at the Utah state capitol, especially because for so long media outlets have been the targets of such efforts to disrupt the daily flow of "news." While the Salk Lake press conference pales in both imagination and impact to the 2004 hoodwinking of the BBC by the Yes Men, it's still notable for its comic intervention into our very serious (and some might argue stale) debates about religion and homosexuality, and also for highlighting questions about how news media interpret satire.

In an article published nearly 20 years ago in the New York Times, the journalist Mark Dery used the term "culture jamming" to describe how rebel artists and activists use deception as a kind of "artistic 'terrorism' directed against the information society in which we live."

"Cultural jamming, on its most profound level," Dery wrote, "is about remaking reality."

Remaking reality was certainly on the minds of the local activists who planned the news conference as a way to call attention to "the intense anti-lgbt climate in Utah." That motivation continues to unfold on the website of Patriots for a Moral Utah. If you dig deeply enough through the satire, you'll get to the truth Fruhwirth and other journalists were looking for: "We love our community, and hope that our political farce has helped in highlighting what we feel is the ridiculousness and cruelty of some in our legislature and groups like the Eagle Forum, the Patrick Henry Caucus and America Forever."

Whether trickster-tactics like the news conference succeed in shifting political realities, or whether culture jams simply fuel the fire, are unanswered (unanswerable?) questions. Yet the Utah prank, and many others like it sure to follow in the future, invites interpreters to move beyond the easy calls – It's a fraud! It's a joke! It's a hoax! – and toward an appreciation of satire as a way of deepening our cultural conversations.

J. Terry Todd is Associate Professor of American Religious Studies at Drew University and director of Drew's Center on Religion, Culture & Conflict. The author of many articles on religion in 20th-century America, Terry is especially interested in religious conflicts over family life and sexuality, and how Christian ideas and practices shape U.S. politics and mass media.