Rights and Freedoms

No small number of Republican lawmakers have Democratic wives. They are fabulous and in some cases outspoken and lead the legislative ladies on adventures to places some of the Republican women otherwise might never go.

One legislative husband, Skip Smyser, former law maker himself and lobbyist but not a Democrat has done more for Human Rights education in the legislature than I will ever do in my lifetime. He rents out the Egyptian and gets lawmakers together to see a movie each year. This year it was Amazing Grace a film about ending the British slave trade. Actually it is very much a movie about the legislative process as men in powdered wigs battle in a chamber that makes even Idaho's house of Representatives look sedate and dispassionate.

Skip's movie nights kill me emotionally. I sit eating candy and cry as discreetly as I can possibly manage. Other law makers cry too. Progressive law makers say kind things to me after. My socially conservative friends instead quote the few lines from the film that keep them sternly entrenched where they are on the other side of any Human Rights issues at hand. Talking afterward it is hard to believe they saw the same movie I did. But they did and I can only hope that later in dreams more will come back to them, that they will soften and see something like the shadow of pain in the eyes of others for a brief moment in time.

Tonight at the Dairymen's dinner, a colleague quoted to me a line from the movie Amazing Grace. It was about having to give up your freedoms because someone else is in a hurry to have government protect someones rights.

I had to grip my beer glass tight to really hear the assertion that slave owners gave up their "freedom" to make money off the labor of men and women they never paid a salary to. How do I fathom someone seeing that as a "freedom" to be taken from slave owners rather than as a thing they had stolen from some other human beings... I do not know. I do know that these are the same lawmakers who see Idaho's human rights act as a law that robs them of the freedom to fire whom they choose, a restriction on their business and beliefs that remains intolerable to them so far to this day.