Notes From The Floor

Adding the Words: What We Agree On

The first amendment of the US Constitution, guaranteeing freedom of speech and freedom of religion is one which I and other advocates for Add the Words respect deeply. We respect it every bit as much as Idaho legislative leaders do.

Out of this respect, some of us have agreed and have a willingness to make clear in the bill, to spell out and reiterate the exact nature of first amendment rights as they relate to the inclusion of gay and transgender people in Idaho's human rights act. Most notable is number 5 which assures business owners that they can not be compelled to produce speech (as in writing on a cake or printing on a t-shirt. I myself for example would never make a racist t-shirt if I owned a t-shirt shop.) This is a fundamental first amendment right. In fact, recently, higher courts appear to agree with what the language in number 5 below states.

Yes, we agree, a business must bake a cake or sell a t-shirt, but that business does not have to write on a product a message that's different in meaning from what they would write on a product for any other customer.

The language below is what we have proposed could be included in the Idaho Human Rights Act at the addition of the enumerated classes “sexual orientation, gender identity.” The act prohibits discrimination in employment, housing, education, and public accommodation, meaning business and government services.

The inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity in this act 

1.    Affirms the individual religious liberties guaranteed under the provisions of the Idaho Human Rights Act, federal law the U.S. Constitution as well as other sections of Idaho code

2.    Affirms the rights of churches and clergy to refuse to solemnize marriages on church grounds or as a part of activities organized by a 501c3 religious organization

3.    Affirms the rights of clergy and church staff in performance of their religious duties as part of a 501c3 religious organization, to refuse solemnize any marriage or to refuse to participate in or celebrate any marriage or union

4.    Affirms the right of business owners to refuse to provide products, accessories, decorations or other items not otherwise produced, included, or offered for sale to other customers by that proprietor’s businesses

5.    Affirms the first amendment rights of individual business owners, including the right to refuse to customize products or produce individually tailored services if the entire product, decoration of the product, or service itself is written or verbal speech which differs substantively in content rather than in context, from that produced or made available by the business to other customers

6.    Affirms the rights of business owners to establish standards of dress if the standards do not otherwise violate this act and are applied equally to all employees, with the exception of persons with disabilities needing accommodation or those exercising their rights to religious or other expression as established by federal law and the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution 

We are not Utah. We are Idaho.

Yesterday, after another year of work asking Idaho legislative leaders to include gay and transgender people in Idaho's longstanding and well tested nondiscrimination laws, I received the following letter from Senate Leader Brent Hill on behalf of himself, Senate Leaders and Governor Otter:

 

It was titled: "Thanks"

Dear Nicole,

Thank you for the note. I appreciate your desire to work something out on legislation prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity that is still respectful of religious rights and freedoms. Please understand, though, that “public accommodations” are not on the table. If you are interested in a balanced approach resembling Utah’s compromise, I would be happy to visit, but, as I have already indicated, feedback I am getting from my colleagues clearly indicates that there is not sufficient support in either the House or the Senate to advance even a Utah-style solution.

Again, if you and your associates want to help advance legislation not addressing public accommodations and similar to Utah’s, I would be happy to work with you to see if we could garnish enough support to give it a try. Anything more aggressive on your part is not achievable. 

Sincerely,

Brent

 

This is my response:

Senator Hill and Senators Davis, Winder and Governor Otter,

 

I am surprised by and do not understand your answer. I have asked over and over to understand why you are comfortable with the idea of Idahoans working next to gay and transgender people or renting housing to us, but will not ensure that people sell us groceries, serve us food, pump gasoline, fix our broken cars or repair our washing machines. Why is public accommodation like this unacceptable to you? I’m mystified to hear you four state leaders --whom I consider compassionate, humane people-- I’m mystified to hear you insist that gay and transgender people are not human enough to be fully included in our state human rights act. 

 

Do you see us as deserving of the daily humiliation of being turned away from businesses in communities across the state?

Do you not care that young people, especially in small communities, will simply continue to despair knowing this humiliation awaits them, even after the brutality of high school?

 

I don’t understand. I thought better of all of you.

 

I also think you grossly misunderstand the will of the body, in both the house and senate. A majority are waiting for your lead in somehow solving this problem. Because of Senator Lakey's fundamental lack of openness on this issue, using him to conduct a head count is a grave error. Many members have gay and transgender children, siblings, friends and family they feel should live with a greater sense of security and the liberty to work hard, support their families and do business in their own communities and the state they love. You will never know or see this because of the way you approach this issue with them.

 

I will publicly respond taking the Utah bill point by point to show why we in Idaho would never want legislation like that in our state. Not only did it set back Utah cities in the protections they had been able to afford to hard working citizens of their communities, but language included in it essentially destroyed the very protections it pretended to extend. I think you all, including Senator Davis, respect my intelligence more than to think I would ever agree to harm the very people I am trying to save from lives of uncertainty and loss. 

 

I think you understand that attitudes which set us apart as lesser, as undeserving of the protections extended to other classes of humans, simply reinforce the idea that we are deserving of hate and violence. And you must know by now that we do face hate and violence.

 

This is not a proud day for our state. Not a proud time. I gave you years of work, language to place within public accommodation to genuinely try to address concerns and solve the problems you were willing to share, and yet that is not enough? And after asking again and again to understand what further in public accommodation remains a problem, you still won’t answer?

 

I am saddened beyond belief by your failure to show compassion, your failure to be willing to stand up and say what is right and what is wrong. I am saddened that instead you would like to write into law a lessening of our humanity, a trojan horse of kindness to save face for yourselves.

 

This is a sad day but perhaps a necessary one. I have honestly defended each of you to the good people of this state. I am done with that role. I am done having faith in the hearts of each of you.

 

…nicole

 

Former Senator 

Nicole LeFavour

 

 

You can send a letter to your legislators explaining the harm done when they again fail at passing legislation to fully include gay and transgender people in Idaho's non discrimination laws. Persuade them it is time and that we need their support in moving Senate leaders to finally add the words.  includeusidaho.org

 

I'm still here

It's true, I'm no longer sitting in that seat on the floor of the Idaho Senate or House. I'm not rising to speak when something needs to be said, but my voice is still out here and in the Capitol each year, and though I'm often invisible, I will be in the big marble building gathering others and working quietly until gay and transgender people are finally safe here, our jobs and livelihoods and families are no longer at risk --whether we are exercising our constitutional right to marry or just simply trying to shop at a store or eat dinner in a restaurant. It is 2016. We should be safe and not have to fear that our state by its silence endorses violence against us. We should not have to fear being turned away from businesses.

In my heart I know our state is better than the policy it allows to be printed in its books of code.

I'm going nowhere until the laws change and good people are included in our state anti-discrimination statutes. I am going nowhere until hard working neighbors and friends are afforded the dignity of having recourse when they face discrimination, violence and acts of cruelty. For Idaho, it will get better. To the young I say remember the love of all of us out here and know that people can be better and braver and kinder than our laws.

It's 2016. Be brave. Let's make it so Idaho. 

...nicole

Former Idaho Senator Nicole LeFavour

I write a column every other week called From the Far Margin. I write on many topics. You might like: Three Red Lights, In Favor of Pitchforks, Walls of Ice, The Beauty of Dream

In the Interest of Both Church and State

The U.S. Constitution begs us not to let religion conflict with protecting the lives & liberties of those whom we, as public servants, are sworn to govern and serve. Some will always use religion to grasp at reasons to continue long traditions of discrimination. But in a civil society, to permit some to treat any group of humans as less-- by depriving them of employment, housing or public service by businesses --simply runs counter to the values our nation was founded to embody. On no level of government should discrimination be enshrined, not for the sake of commerce or to appease any religion. Ever.

Nicole's Open Letter to Former Colleagues

Friends, Former Colleagues,  

I no longer serve with you, but I’d like to say a few words. You, of the Idaho House and Senate, I think you know in your hearts, you still have work to do.

I never was allowed the privilege of bringing a bill to “add the words” to the floor of the house or senate. I'd like to you to hear what I would have said had i been granted that dignity. I can not do justice to all the lives affected. There is so much you will hear when you finally listen to the stories of gay people, your sons and daughters, nieces, nephews, neighbors, and silent friends.

First, despair takes far too many of young people. It never should. Please consider the loneliness of a young person who has been rejected by their parents, then their church, even their friends. Too many stand over sinks with razors or knives alone, because no one stood to protect them when the world grew cruel.

You may feel this matter is not a place for policy but for church or family. But what of when one or both fail good people? Should any one of God's beautiful young creations feel they are unworthy of life? What if this were your child?

There is sometimes folly in religions when they need to find demons from among us. Every century, every decade has had them. And politics takes them up because what church preaches is powerful. It motivates action and votes. But at the expense of lives? So people we love live in fear of meeting a baseball bat in a parking lot or alley?

I know none of you wish harm on anyone. Tragically though, this legislature’s failure to act is the same as an endorsement of the violence, a nod to the unworthiness people feel when they live in fear and no one will stand for them. In the far, most rural parts of Idaho it can be the hardest. What if this were your child? Your sister or brother?

Politics and political parties are not your highest obligation as law makers or as citizens of this beautiful state. Your highest obligation is to protect lives, to ensure freedom, liberty and life. 

Please. This is so simple. Idaho already has laws that decry cruelty on the basis of chosen religion, race, disability, national origin, age over 40 and gender. Every business in Idaho operates within these laws and has for decades. The laws mediate and protect businesses and as much as alleged victims. They allow penalization only for blatant, intentional, systematic acts of cruelty; the kind trampling of a person’s liberty that we all feel civilized societies can not function with or tolerate. It is very simple to include gay and transgender people, my people, me, within these existing public safety statutes.

Please, understand lives will be lost quietly each year, each month, you do not to act, each day that more of us despair.

Thank you for reading this. Please put conscience before politics. With respect.

…nicole

 

Former Senator Nicole LeFavour
Box 775 Boise, Idaho 83701
208 724-0468 • [email protected]

 

P.S. This bill is so simple. Just insert four words “sexual orientation, gender identity” within the Idaho Human Rights Act which is the state’s existing fair employment, housing and education law.

The Speaker or Pro Tem could request a hearing on the bill and it would, as you all well know, with your help, still have time to pass this year. Please.

 

Photos from the Road

Photos from my 2012 Campaign for U.S. Congress.

500 Volunteers. 10 Staff. 4 field offices. 2000 donors. Over $300,000 raised from regular ordinary Idahoans. 110,000 votes in one of the toughest years to run as a Democrat in Idaho. Over 1/4 million phone calls made. Over 25,000 voters contacted and logged. More votes than any Democrat has gotten in the East half of the state ever.

With my deepest respect & gratitude: Thank you all. With LOVE & hope that we can & will do better. My staff is phenomenal. We would be nothing but 10 people in a cafe without all of YOU who gave time or money to make this happen. We organized half the state in ways that helped other candidates on November 6th. The work you all did will continue to help many in the years ahead.
What will I do next. I don't know. I do know it's not over Idaho.
.. nicole

Stay in touch: http://4idaho.org

What to Celebrate

Eight months ago, standing in the statehouse considering whether to run for Congress, I figured I could run a good campaign. What's amazing is that, together with thousands of you, my team ran the best campaign many have ever seen run in Idaho. Stronger, better organized, more tech savvy, more deeply rooted in communities and more issue-focused than I could have imagined.

NUMBERS

Thirty-five percent of the vote. While that sounds dismal, it still means more than 110,000 voters chose me over Mike Simpson on Tuesday. I think that's ten thousand more votes in the east half of the state than any democrat in any congressional or statewide race has ever gotten. And in spite of how LDS enthusiasm for Mitt Romney made this one of the most difficult possible years to run as a Democrat in Idaho, it appears that our campaign brought in about 25,000 new voters to participate in this election. That's an impressive twenty-five thousand people who did not vote in the 2008 presidential race.

We engaged Idaho's powerful Hispanic community and worked so hard that Mike Simpson gained fewer than 2,000 votes from the Romney tide. In fact thousands of LDS men and women and more than 10,000 Republicans and Independents voted for me. That was the work we all did on the phones and the doors --and it mattered.

CHANGING THE DEBATE

More than anything, you all allowed me to finally have the resources to use TV and direct mail to push back on issues we so rarely get to re-define here in Idaho. I'm proud we exposed the attitudes that have led to Idaho's grim record on fair pay for women and the kind of cowardice that allowed passage of the Luna laws. We also changed the debate on budget cuts by focusing on job loss, and explained who the job creators really are in the economy and why.

And last but not least, we've put to rest the question of whether Idahoans will actually vote for a gay person.

GRATITUDE

I feel profoundly grateful to you all. From the unemployed carpenter who gave me four dollars, to the Republican mothers, fathers and working people who've crossed streets and sent email to tell me they voted for me. From the long hours and tremendous heart, hard work and intelligence of my staff and volunteers, to the sense that so many of you gave your time and money because this work is something you believe in.

This has been the most amazing experience of my life. We've made history. Idaho needs us all to keep talking to neighbors over picket fences in our communities, volunteering to organize other volunteers, raising money or using phone calls to change minds on the issues we care about -- perhaps to strengthen political organizations and non-profits, to run campaigns or, for many of you, to run for office yourselves.

WHAT'S NEXT

I have no idea what I'm doing next but I love this state. Sadly, Idaho has failed so many families who've faced hardship these past years, those who've lost jobs and homes or small businesses; those who've waited so long for respect and dignity or legal status; those who strive for simple security or the tools for independence; those who struggle to pay for a college degree or just to put a meal on the table.

The work is not over. What you all have done is so beautiful. Many of you came to this because you care and believe Idaho and its policy makers can do better. Lives depend on all of us using our skills to motivate friends to challenge our Idaho Congressmen, state lawmakers and local officials when policies become cruel or disrespectful.

For the lives and futures of people we care about, let's carry with us what we did this year and make this congressional campaign not an end, but a beginning.

 

Add the Words 3rd VIDEO: Only Stronger

On February 10 the bill to Add the Words to include gay and transgender people in Idaho's Human Rights Act was killed without a word of public testimony. For six years the Idaho legislature has refused to allow a single public hearing on the legislation to ban discrimination in employment, housing and education. Tell your Idaho law makers it is finally time to stand up and say discrimination is wrong. http://addthewords.org

Send your message now respectfully asking the Senators to reconsider the bill and Add the Words.

Sen. McKenzie: [email protected] (208) 367-9400
Sen. McGee: [email protected] (208) 455-3950
Sen. Lodge: [email protected]
Sen. Winder: [email protected] (208) 343-2300
Sen. Fulcher: [email protected] (208) 332-1340
Sen Davis: [email protected] (208) 522-8100
Sen. Hill: [email protected] (208) 356-3677

Letters to the Editor Idaho Statesman: https://forms.idahostatesman.com/lettertoeditor/

Idaho Press Tribune: You may mail, fax or e-mail your letter to the editor, but letters must include your full name (no initials), home address and daytime and evening telephone numbers for verification. If you have questions regarding your letter, please call (208) 465-8115 or e-mail:
[email protected]

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Add the Words Idaho is an all volunteer organization of people all across Idaho working to demonstrate the level of public support for inclusion of gay and transgender Idahoans in the state's laws banning discrimination in employment, housing education and public accommodation. Add the Words has gathered over 2000 messages to Idaho legislators written on sticky notes from people in more than 60 Idaho towns. http://addthewords.org

Thanks to Lucy Juarez for video footage, and to Jim Huggins and Stacy Ericson for still photos. Thanks to Lisa Perry and all those organizing or participating in positive silent protests across the state.
Thanks to Dave at Rail Tees on Overland for the Add the Words T-shirt design and printing.

Live in Boise? Find out how you can post your sticky note in the statehouse any time, day or night.

http://addthewords.org

Add the Words VIDEO

http://addthewords.org

To Those In Favor of Bullying

I've paced every bit of marble around the rotunda between the two chambers many times today. I've been on the phone and visited members in their rabbit warren of basement office suites one after another. Senate members have talked to House members with me but it is no good now. The bullying bill S1105 is dead. It died on the calendar for lack of consideration.

To the young people from Sandpoint, Nampa, Jerome, Boise, Challis and across the state who I have told "It gets Better" -- I need you to know, it does. Even if the most powerful in our state don't all yet understand the road you've walked, the strength you have had to find inside your selves when others said you had none. Still it gets better. I have promised to make it better -- and I will. We will.

This year we tried so hard and came so close. But you must know there are people here who have not heard your stories. There are elected Representatives who think that bullying makes a person stronger. They need to understand how wrong that is.

And yes I asked them:

Have you never walked then in the shoes of a child whose family has rejected them, their church has turned them away, and now, at school, they are taunted or hit by those who think difference is a weakness -- that it gives others a license to cause pain.

Have you never been a child whose life is a struggle on its own --and for whom school could be salvation or a hell --but because of the calculated cruelty of just one person, it does become a hell.

Have you have never watched a young person fail to see the beauty inside themselves? Have you watched someone see nothing but darkness -- no strength or promise -- until that they take their own life?

If you ever imagined such sadness, you might have fought for this bill.

But the House has just gaveled an end and adjourned for the year. The Senate has been done for a few hours. The kind words there flowed for a bit like and odd balm after three months of battle. The issues from closed primaries to rejecting federal health reform, cutting mental health treatment and education all split the Republican Party and the Senate itself again and again.

And the bill to make it better for young people died.

 

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There is no end in this though only a beginning because there need to be more voices next year. If you have stories you need to share them. We need them. We need you to help us make sure it gets better. [email protected]

Not Giving Up

It is a bit sad that it was on Valentines day that Senator McKenzie said he didn't plan to schedule a hearing on S1033 to finally make it so gay people in Idaho can no longer be legally fired from our jobs for no other reason than that we are gay.

But let's be clear, no one I know is giving up. We can't. Next year is an election year, and every year there has been some reason why another year would be better to consider this legislation. Enough of this.

For Idaho law to continue to stay silent is to say that all the cruelty, the violence, the discrimination is acceptable, that it is ok in the state of Idaho.

It is time for a public hearing. That is next to nothing to ask. It is long past time for the legislature to listen to our stories, see what people face, hard working men and women, many of whom love this state and stay though many other states would value our lives more, would ensure our freedom and ensure we can work at a job, keep our houses, go to school and simply live our lives in peace.

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The Safe Schools & Fair Employment Working Group is not giving up. Please let law makers know how you feel, lend your name in support using the on line petition or have your business endorse the legislation:  http://4idaho.org/humanrights

How to Tank a State Economy

Easy Steps for Lawmakers.

Many Idahoans wonder when their state will begin to feel the national economic recovery.  They worry as January's Idaho jobless numbers showed the state's economic crisis deepening rather than improving. Yet today the state faces a third year of dire fiscal crisis with budget cuts now exceeding half a billion. Below are real strategies that Idaho's Superintendent of Public Instruction and / or members of the Idaho Legislature is currently contemplating, has proposed or has actually legislated during the 2010 and 2011 sessions.

How to Tank a State Economy: Easy Steps for Lawmakers.

1. Destroy Jobs

A. Lay off as many state employees as possible

• Tom Luna's proposal to eliminate 770 teaching jobs is particularly effective since these are people with benefits that hundreds of families rely on. Losing health insurance effectively makes these families more economically fragile.

• The thousands of "vacant positions" in state government guarantees increases in unemployment and reductions in consumer spending in every sector of the economy. This helps weaken struggling restaurants, shops and producers of consumer goods who rely on local spending.

B. Reduce wages

• Any legislation which offers economic incentives to school districts to lay off more experienced teachers in a budget crunch is highly effective at reducing wages and the quality of education and can half the annual salaries going to 20% of teaching families in any given community in a single budget year. This pulls hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars from local economies, small businesses and consumer spending.

• Low levels of educational attainment, high drop out rates and high cost education all decrease the wage earning, consumer spending and tax paying potential of a state's residents.

• Furloughs while less effective at harming an economy in the short term, when carried out over multiple years can ensure that family savings dwindle, can reduce discretionary spending and may produce out migration and loss of population which is one of the most effective ways to ensure economic decline. The cost of retraining workers who leave government jobs is very effective at increasing net costs to government and accomplishing goal 3 below.

• Eliminate Unions or anything that resembles an organization that would help raise wages, monitor working conditions and the quality or its members work.

C. Be sure that businesses doing contract work for the state go bankrupt

• Using a strategy that claims a state budget is balanced but which relies on not paying bills owed to private businesses is effective politically and in terms of creating an unstable environment for businesses that have agreed to contracts with the state.

• Lowering reimbursement rates not just for a single year but for multiple years to economically squeeze mental health, medical, residential and out patient care providers is an additional effective strategy.

• Long term freezes in state purchasing and construction are ideal strategies for reducing economic activity and driving many segments of the economy into decline.

D. Repel Businesses Seeking to Move into Your State

• Be sure your public schools rank last in the nation for per pupil spending, class size and adequacy of school facilities, course offerings, text books, lab supplies and equipment and materials essential to teaching.

• Create an environment of political extremism to clearly establish that the majority of those who might choose to re-locate businesses or families into the state would feel unwelcome or unrepresented.

• Ensure that premiums charged by insurance carriers are unregulated and that affordable health coverage for small business is unavailable.

• Underfund your regulatory agencies so that getting permits and compliance assistance with basic health, safety and water quality standards takes a long, long time.

• Provide no anti-discrimination job protections for gay people. Technology companies are full of gay employees. Even if a company provides its own job protections, a state needs to project a hostile enough atmosphere to guarantee that other family members seeking jobs or educational opportunities will face discrimination in employment, housing and education in any given town across the state. Companies avoid states like these and high wage workers or business owners will often leave such states in search of safer places to live and do business.

• Ensure state leaders talk as much as possible about large predatory animals decimating wildlife populations and killing domestic animals.

• Even if you can not pass such a law, at least claim you will enact Arizona-style immigration policies so that employees and business owners with darker skin or names like Martinez or Perez will fear eminent racial profiling, detainment or arrest. The out migration of skilled agricultural labor, small business owners and families will assist in achieving objective 1C above.

2. Increase Costs to Families

A. Force Families into Crisis

• Increase class sizes so struggling students fail to get help and those facing depression and suicide are less likely to interact with a teacher who has the time to notice their struggles.

• Reduce access to Mental Health and Substance Abuse Treatment. Long treatment waiting lists are helpful but eliminating the waiting lists and just failing to provide treatment is also effective and creating crises.

• Reduce services and in-home supports for seniors and people with disabilities. Independence is less costly than dependence. Children without adequate therapeutic interventions will be far more costly to families and state taxpayers.

• Fail to fund or develop a network of low cost health clinics. The fewer options families have, the more likely they are to fail to access preventative care and fall into costly medical crisis and personal bankruptcy.

• Stop funding water quality monitoring, refuse to extensively regulate day care facilities and provide as few counseling services as possible in local schools to ensure an adequate supply of physical and mental health crises statewide.

• Ensure that parole officers and health and welfare case workers carry case loads far exceeding national standards so that minimal supervision and assistance is provided to Idaho individuals and families. The added stress on the case workers themselves can create additional pressures to achieve this goal.

B. Make Education More Expensive

• Eliminate public Kindergarten. Make sure your state's children start out behind the rest of the nation.

• Fail to provide text books, paper, pencils, field trips, lab supplies, transportation and other basic materials in public schools.

• Force parents to pay fees before their children can attend certain public school classes or participate in sports, arts, field trips or other enrichment opportunities. Ensuring poorer children never participate is helpful in ensuring a state continues to have a high poverty rate, a high rate of need for public services, a greater level of of need for crisis medical care and higher need for tax increases.

• Increase class sizes to increase failure rates, decrease social and emotional support for students and increase alienation and drop out rates in upper grades. The cost to families of addressing remediation, tutoring and juvenile corrections court costs and incarceration can effectively weaken the economic stability of tens of thousands of families.

• Require public schools students take on-line classes in order to graduate. Decreased teacher interaction and the lack of support for those who struggle can be highly effective at wasting years of college tuition as students fail classes or need extensive remedial coursework. The impact on families of students with disabilities can be impressive as those with certain learning styles have higher failure rates and are more likely to fall into cycles of dependence later in life should support in these early years be inadequate.

• Fail to fund higher education so that college tuition and fees continue to increase. Making a college degree too expensive for most college graduates also helps achieve goal 1B above.

C. Remain Dependent on Fossil Fuels

• Deny local communities the ability to fund public transportation. In urban areas this guarantees tax dollars are sucked rapidly into perpetual freeway widening projects which produce few jobs but expend state revenues on raw materials. A lack of public transportation also directly increases costs to families who struggle with with car maintenance or gas prices or for those commuters who waste time in traffic during their commute.

• Make sure not to create state level car fuel efficiency standards or electric utility renewable portfolio standards. Being vulnerable to high oil prices or out of state coal generated electricity ensures that business and residential consumers pay high prices and remain vulnerable to world political strife.

D. Increase User Fees for Everything

• After all these are not taxes. Increasing costs to families and businesses through fees works just as well to fund the costly crisis care that is sure to follow a lack of adequate tax payer funded preventative care services.

• Get creative. Fees on prisoners or parents of those in the Juvenile Justice system work really at creating additional stressors for families already in crisis. Asking the general population to help fund government by paying taxes will only give those leaving prisons a chance at economic stability and ruin an opportunity to push them into a lifetime of crime and costly incarceration.

• Ensuring failure of your public school system can help bring on privatization and a stratification of the quality of educational opportunity available to families of differing incomes. User fees in education are not a new concept. They are a bridge to stratification and ensure that some kids will not be able to reach the same levels of academic attainment that the more wealthy do. This perpetuates poverty and assists in achieving goals 1B and 2A above.

3. Keep State Government in Perpetual Fiscal Crisis

A. Turn away federal matching funds or any form of money paid to the federal government by taxpayers in your state.

• Cut medicaid and with each $3 million reduction in state spending, presto $7 million in federal dollars will also be lost.

• Violate federal laws so that your state faces sanctions. Refusing to enact federal health care reform for example may well result in the state losing all federal funds for medicaid --meaning a loss to health providers, businesses and families of nearly a billion in federal dollars.

B. No matter how well the national economy is recovering, predict doom for your own state.

• Keep revenue projections artificially low so you can cut government services across the board again and again.

• Call any revenues over the low projections a "surplus" and use those to fund tax breaks for large corporations and the most wealthy. (Do not restore funding for jobs, purchasing, construction or to fund schools, classrooms, mental health treatment, substance abuse prevention or disability services.)

C. Create Political Strife.

• Make sure the super majority of your Republican party fights with itself so any moderates who happen to be re-elected in any given year will be forced to live in fear of actually voting as moderates and thus will ensure the perpetuation of your disaster.

D. No Matter How Much Things Fall Apart, Don't Raise Taxes.

• Don't think about what Jesus would do. Not raising taxes ensures that all of the above policies seem like necessary if not critical budget cutting measures.

• Raising taxes might ease the conscience in the short term as the morale of state workers improves; schools again begin to meet the needs of more fragile students; seniors, the poor and those with disabilities stop losing their homes, entering institutions and dying of preventable disease or untreated mental and physical aliments. But, in fact, raising taxes creates an expectation within a state population that government can do positive things.

• And we all know that's silly.

 4. Reduce The State's Population

A. Nothing says economic disaster like death and out migration. (See above.)

Making Sure It Gets Better in Idaho

Many times in my life i have struggled to promise young people that their lives will get better. All these decades later as so many still face school bullying, harassment and even violence, I know I am not the only one who feels the growing weight of obligation to make sure that the lives of young people actually do get better. Not someday, but now.

FIRST: Idaho's anti-bullying law doesn't even mention gay kids.

SECOND: Tragically Idaho has the third highest suicide rate in the nation.  Nationally 1/3 of teen suicides has to do with young people's struggles coping with issues of sexual orientation or gender identity. Too many American kids do not feel safe at school, welcome at church or accepted in their own homes.

THIRD: Suicide is not the only tragedy to come from rejection, fear and a lack of legal protection. Too many young people find themselves more vulnerable to drug addiction and depression as they face these issues alone in rural communities or in silence in our cities.

FORTH: Anti-gay bullying is one of the most common forms of bullying in schools. Here still some teachers fear addressing anti-gay harassment in classrooms because at times teachers have faced disciplinary measures simply for mentioning the word gay. And because Idaho's anti-bullying law doesn't mention any specific kinds of bullying, it leaves open for some students, teachers and parents to believe that gay kids might be an exception to the anti-bullying rule.

If we are going to plead with Idaho's young people not to despair or ever consider self destructive acts like suicide, then we have an obligation; That obligation is to be sure that we change Idaho law so that gay kids are clearly safe and protected.

We must do all we can to make sure it gets better now-- not years from now, but now.

 

Saturday, January 29th will be a statewide day of vigils, rallies and events to support safe schools and fair employment legislation to protect gay Idahoans from job discrimination and Idaho kids from anti-gay bullying. If you are a business person, straight ally, young person or anyone who wants to help organize an event, large or small in your community, let us know. I will pass your information to Lindsey Matson who will work to connect you with other people in your community or area who also want to help.

See photos and more from events in 11 towns across Idaho on Jan 29 and get involved in passing legislation this year. http://4idaho.org/humanrights

 

In Defense of Dignity

You don't know how slow progress is until you have worked for 15 years on an issue and have had to count movement forward in promised but hypothetical yes votes, numbers of co-sponsors and the quality of conversations you have with those many who have been seemingly dead set against the issue since you began.

There are hundreds of people in Idaho who have worked longer than I have to see some basic level of respect and dignity afforded to gay people by Idaho law. I sit in the middle of the place where this progress is supposed to happen and I see well that we have a choice. We can grow bitter and complacent writing the Idaho legislature off as hopeless, or we can work hard and cling to the incremental progress, to the raw numbers of people willing to put their names on the line, attach themselves to the bill to make this small change finally happen, even in an election year. It is glacial but if you look, there is something there.

This year again there was again of course legislation before the Idaho Senate to add sexual orientation and gender identity to Idaho's human and civil rights laws, just as local governments have now done in Salt Lake City Utah this past fall and in Pocatello, in Boise and in cities and states all across the West over the past decade. This year Idaho's legislation however never saw the light of day. The chairman would not allow it even an introductory print hearing to assign the the bill a number and put it in the state computer. Yet realize that we now have four solid yes votes in the committee, up from the three we had last year, but just shy of the five we need to get the bill actually passed from committee and to the floor of the Senate for a vote. That is progress. In many ways that is huge progress.

Senate State Affairs is a tough committee. It grew tougher for human rights issues when Brad Little left Senate Republican Majority leadership to stand over the Senate as our Lt. Governor. Russ Fulcher, very kind and willing to listen but religiously much more the fundamentalist, took Brad's place in leadership and on the State Affairs Committee. 

Other committees are far less tough and this year's human and civil rights bill would have no trouble being printed there. In one or maybe two committees it might even pass. But State Affairs is the Committee that the Pro Tem and leadership use like a sieve for social issues. Anti-immigrant bills, anti-abortion bills, anti-gay constitutional amendments and now any positive human rights legislation. Yet this is the committee we have to go through to get even a simple hearing, a chance for people to explain why our state will be a better place if we chose as a law making body to legislate that injustice against gay people is in fact also injustice; that it is the policy of the state that discrimination is wrong and that gay people will no longer be omitted -- because an omission of such an obvious and targeted group says only one thing: it says that discrimination and denial of basic dignity, human and civil rights to students, renters, business customers and employees in our sate is acceptable. We say every day by virtue of this lingering omission that such discrimination is acceptable.

Idaho is a live-and-let-live state. The fear some of my colleague's feel for this issue is strange in the face of the fact that so many people now know someone gay and that young people can not imagine why we live in a world where such injustice is acceptable policy. Three years ago 64% of Idahoans and a solid majority in every part of the state said that it should be illegal to fire people just because they are gay. What I know is change will only happen when that ordinary majority of Idahoans stop law makers on the street and say kindly that they care, that they support an improvement in Idaho law to extend dignity, civil and human rights to gay people just as we do to all people based on age, religion,sex, national origin, disability and race.

The legislature has heard from gay people for well more than 15 years and our voices I fear sometimes are seen as those of a tiny minority speaking desperately for itself. For a second year I say, we can't do this alone. We need our co-workers, neighbors, parents, friends, classmates, teachers and employers to speak up with us now.

I give deepest thanks to the fearless in the Senate who have stood up for and with us when it was hard: Joe Stegner, Tim Corder, and Edgar Malepeai. To former Senate Majority Leader Bill Roden who, with House Assistant Minority Leader James Ruchti, was ready to present the bill before Chairman Curt McKenzie and the Senate State Affairs Committee, and to the 27 co-sponsors below I say, your actions and bravery mean the world to us. 

SENATE CO-SPONSORS:

Edgar Malepeai, Joe Stegner, Kate Kelly, Elliot Werk, John Andreason, Gary Schroeder, Tim Corder, me, Les Bock.

HOUSE CO-SPONSORS:

James Ruchti, John Rusche, Bill Killen, Tom Trail, Wendy Jaquet, Donna Boe, Elaine Smith, Shirley Ringo, George Sayler, Anne Pasley-Stuart, Donna Pence, Sue Chew, Liz Chavez, Phylis King, Branden Durst, Grant Burgoyne, Elfreda Higgins, Brain Cronin.

This list does not include the many Republicans and Democrats who now will vote for the bill when it comes to the floor of the House and Senate, that list is growing long and wonderful. These above are the law makers willing to put their names on the line up front. I hope you will thank them.

To sign the petition in support of next year's legislation and to get involved go HERE.

Pan Back

The statehouse has been quiet today while many legislators are away for Atwell Parry's funeral. The long marble halls which connect the two underground wings seem empty, while upstairs movie cameras on mechanical arms swivel as Idaho media day shows off what is going on in on of Idaho's little known creative and often highly technological industries.

And here in the now marbled depths my inbox keeps filling with letters asking us to save Idaho Public Television. In JFAC this morning IPTV brought a second camera on line so that now in the coming weeks you can watch the expressions on our faces, the lines in our foreheads as we debate motions to cut, to fund or to de-fund every state service under the sun.

And still the wheels turn. Mike Jorgenson & John McGee's anti-immigration bills seek to make it yet harder for farms and ranches to harvest crops and do business. We debate again which disability services to make more expensive and whether or not we should mandate that insurance companies cover oral chemotherapy drugs just as they would injectable chemotherapy. We all work away on slightly narrower slices of bills -- those with no cost associated. The Human and Civil Rights legislation that so many have worked on for four years is no exception. There is still a group of law makers dedicated to it. The group is more bi-partisan than ever and more diverse, fueled by success in adding sexual orientation and gender identity in similar non-discrimination measures in Pocatello, Caldwell and especially Salt Lake. 

This session will be like many others and yet not. There is no magic stimulus on the horizon galloping forward to make us giddy with relief, just sober numbers we can chose to change or choose to force the people of Idaho to live with.

Pan out to lines of people waiting for food stamps; pollution leaking into drinking water aquifers, lakes and steams that DEQ will not test for the second year in  row; school offices where administrators calculate which teacher will take the extra students as teachers and counselors are laid off; closed signs hang on offices; paint peels; state pay checks shrink. Pan back far enough and the place gets green-gray with peaks white, more eternal and seemingly impervious. We will get through this. Now is the hard part.

Dreaming of Fire

This is my Martin Luther King Jr. Human Rights Day Speech for BSU's 2010 March and Rally. I will be joining student leaders, our Human Rights community and wonderful speakers at Boise City Hall at about 11:15. At noon we will all join the Human Rights Commission inside the Capitol rotunda as they return to the tradition of holding a Human Rights Celebration in the statehouse.

Dreaming of Fire

…To me hope is sometimes a fragile thing. It burned bright in me a year ago as our country inaugurated a president who embodied the reality of the Dream. I myself stood on grounds of our nation’s Capitol gazing at the faces that now comprise our beautiful nation, a nation of colors, creeds, talents and dreams that are finally passing from sleep into waking.  

But today in Idaho I fear the collective light of the Dream has suffered in the bitter months of this winter… sadly here we face the chilling anger of people at computers and town halls desperate to place blame as they stagger too under the weight of profound economic injustice.   We face the chill of Governor Otter’s proposals to eliminate, to phase out, the few agencies of the state charged with advancing human rights for Latinos, for people with disabilities, the deaf and the blind…. our Human Rights Commission itself .

Idaho’s Governor rejects the very entities we have charged with advancing equality and justice for those denied it for so long.  

Is that acceptable to us?

Will that help Idaho further the dream?

Will this ensure the fair treatment of people we call family, coworkers, classmates, and friends ?  

No. We know this is wrong. Though it has been four decades, Dr. King’s words still have the power to warm us and guide our nation from within -- like a bon fire. Sadly in Idaho while the dream often wanes, its burning pieces are still held by each of us who hope, who work, who stand up in the streets to protect or welcome others or to instill in our children a tiny fire of their own.  

But inside us Dr. King’s dream, our dream can be a fragile thing, an ember of fire, a warmth and promise of justice that you -- like me -- may have kept from the wind, may have tucked deep in your clothes –carried in your chest, pulled out and held tight in your hands every time the world around you faltered, made you unwelcome or fell in its progress toward equality and justice.  

And while hope glows in the windows of the white house and in bits of policy in the nation’s capitol -- while we hope for a day when none will again face bankruptcy in the face of cancer – and while we hope for a day when families will re-unite, fear will fade, and our country will recognize its need for the nations and people to the South – that day is not yet here.  

…..Instead we look up to a state government set on stalling progress.   We walk streets that bleed harsh words while too many Idahoans have waited too long, holding embers of hope smothered daily by words of cruelty – a boy taunted on a playground for his delicate walk; the woman with her children on a street made unwelcome; a girl trying in vain to get beyond the stairs; a driver arrested for his differences, his color; the man demonized not for actions but for the accent on his tongue. ----When our daily experiences stifle the dream, we grow cold, isolated and the ember of that promise can fade inside us.  

I ask one thing of each of you today.......... We can be a state kinder than our policy makers. We can ourselves create a state of promise in spite of those who would divide us, those who would marginalize or demean those we love or care for, our neighbors, coworkers, family, friends.  

I ask you to practice using your own voice, your breath to erase the cold someone you know has felt. Think of someone who has faced hate, who has stood in the face of discrimination.   Think. Picture that person now, see him or her in your mind. (It is OK if that person in your mind is you.) I want you in your mind to say to that person, to someone you have met, or seen or know…….  

“You -- your presence, your voice, your work, your questions..”  I want you to say: “You make our state a better place.”    

Now whisper that aloud with me, look around, say that to every person here who has reeled in the face of harsh or cruel words…... “You make our state a better place.”  

In your minds eye, your words, your breath, think of it igniting that ember of hope just a little in a person’s hands, your words in their mind replacing words of rejection they have faced once, twice, maybe many, many times.  

Say it again with me, to each other, this time louder. “You make our state a better place.”  

OK one last time, this time let’s make sure Senator Malepeai can hear us inside the Capitol. Let’s have our words carry North to the Coeur d’Alene & Nez Perce tribes, South to the Shoshone Paiute, East to the Shoshone Bannock, West to Nampa, Caldwell, Wilder, high into the mountains and to the place the person in your mind can hear us……..   “You make our state a better place.”  

Thank you. Now use that phrase in the streets when you see someone face cruel gestures of unwelcome. Keep Dr. King’s Dream warm, keep it burning in Idaho -- through everything that is to come, through what we each will see and feel and do in our lives ahead.  

May we be strong and united and may we never ever give our seats or our voices to those who would take them.

 

Without Fischer: Less Violence

I keep getting asked how I feel about Bryan Fischer leaving Idaho. Quite frankly what is most striking is how i feel when I think of the impact he has had in the time he has been here, relentlessly repeating the cruel words of national anti-gay groups and spending long days in the legislature with people who should know better than to listen to him.

But of course the media has covered him solidly. That love of controversy has earned him front billing whenever he wanted it. There are not a lot of people willing to dedicate their lives to hurting other people and doing so with a megaphone in public life. So he got covered. The media made him louder, more powerful and more virulent than he might have been somewhere else.

You know when young people write to me about hope, hope that someday they will not be hated or pitied for being gay or where they will feel safe and not ridiculed or targeted for violence, I think of Bryan Fischer. If it was his goal to ensure that gay teens in Idaho would find themselves in a hostile world, then he accomplished that.

Idaho has one of the highest teen suicide rates in the nation. Typically in any state about 1/3 of all teen suicides are related to teens struggling with coming out or with conflicts within themselves as to whether or not they are gay. If a parent were inclined to be uncomfortable with their child being gay, sure enough Bryan Fischer would be in the paper over the past decades, talking about how we gay people destroy families and live dangerous lifestyles. Of course he has always hammered away at the idea that being gay is a choice. For a parent and that child, something changes when that is the frame within which you exist. For the parent there is the sense that the child can be forced not to be gay. For the child there is the hostility of those statements, the devaluation of the lives of people who are gay, and the conflict of failure when young people, especially young men find that they can no more make themselves straight than their straight peers can force themselves to find boys attractive and make themselves gay. The idea that gay people can be "fixed" or reprogrammed has long been found false, yet Fischer and people like him know that by insisting that being gay is a choice, they can make it a moral issue, make young people and all of us feel that if we were better people we would not be gay.

I'm sorry, but I think the criticism of Bryan Fischer is all too mild. This man, through his relentless words has incited hatred and violence. He has impacted thousands of lives daily, not for the better, by assisting in forcing through a constitutional amendment not just to ban marriage but to hugely complicate our lives by ensuring that we can in no way be recognized as couples by the state or any government in Idaho. Every year in Idaho we will be turned away from emergency rooms or the bedside a partner who is dying. When we die, our joint possessions can by default be taken away from our partner and given to estranged parents or siblings. Already, our social security benefits can not go to our partners. But here in Idaho now, some couples have had to struggle just to get a family gym membership or health insurance from anti-gay companies like Blue Cross.

The cruelty of all this, the lack of Christian values in working to create an environment where real people suffer, where good people suffer, is what is so hard to take. Young people die at their own hands in this state and I lay some of that blood at Bryan Fisher's feet. When you spend your life perpetuating hate against a group of people, people die, people are beaten and harassed and fired from their jobs and even murdered.

The recent death of Dr. Tiller just shows further how hate leads to violence. Fischer can claim he does not condone violence, but how many times did he ensure that those listening would not do harm to those he condemned? I don't recall a single time.

I wish Bryan Fischer's departure meant an undoing of all the pain and harm he has done to so many. Sadly it doesn't. That is up to the rest of us including that vast majority of Idahoans who know gay people as family, friends, co-workers and classmates. We have to make the changes that end the violence and suicide.

The tide has long been turning against people like Fischer. There were times he was shunned in the legislature, especially in the House under Speaker Bruce Newcomb. I think he found luke warm response to his anti-gay rants and recently focused instead more on promoting absurd fear around gender identity and cross dressing. Nationally, efforts to divide our country over gay people have worn thin but I'm sure Fischer will find others to demean and condemn. I send a quiet apology off into the rain today to the people of Mississippi. I'm sorry you get him now.

Hate, Spit & the Word Gay

A few weeks back I asked people to post signs on their cars, homes and places of work that said in big letters, "Protect Our Gay Friends, Amend Idaho's Human Rights Act." The word gay was particularly big, maybe 7.5 inches wide by 4 inches tall. You couldn't miss it.

My partner Carol and I put one of these paper signs in the back side window of our car. We are gay people and it would be surprising if anyone living around us had not noticed by now that we are gay. Yet still I guess I was taken aback when one morning after we posted the little paper sign, that someone clearly spit on that window of our car. And if a day or two of the spitting was not enough, I drove to a meeting one night and someone put an obscene little flier on my windshield. I admit some places I started parking lately, I wondered if the car would be safe. I knew we would have to take the sign down to go to my mom's place near Challis.

This is all to say that I do recognize that perhaps I was asking too much. That even I might forget how much anger or hate or cruelty there is in the world, that I would ask people to open themselves up to hate, especially straight allies or gay people in rural areas where there is so little safety, that I would put anyone at risk bothers me.

I figure I have grown isolated living in the north end. But if I am isolated to what happens, my legislative colleagues are far more so. They might not see the gleeful cruelty or seething in Bryan Fischers web posts and missives. They might not have visited the web sites where people talk about me as a gay person and about guns in threatening ways. They might not have read the recent email to me saying I should leave Boise because there are people who moved here from places like California to get away from gay people like me. The email was a bit more harsh in its language. I won't quote it.

In essence I reel with trying to comprehend how many of my colleagues do not believe discrimination happens while all around them it does and I only wish they would put one of those big gay signs on their cars and see what happens.

But I don't want to ask that. I don't want to ask that of anyone. So I found better signs. They say "Human Rights for ALL: Amend Idaho's Human RIghts Act." I don't think they will put anyone at risk. As a nation we do believe in Human Rights. As a state the vast majority know people need them. I feel better asking people to post these signs. I think more people will. I know I was asking too much with the other ones.

It was like with talking to one of my colleagues about how best to go about passing the changes to the Human Rights Act we need in order to protect gay people. He said we needed to find a way to do it so that we don't have to say gay, or sexual orientation or gender identity. I'm thinking it is a bit hard to write a law that won't mention the people it is supposed to protect. There is a lot of room for misinterpretation there. If anyone has ideas I'll take them.

Short of that, it is just going to have to become a bit more safe to say the word gay. A lot more people are going to have to say the word (kindly) or wear those signs that say gay someday. Straight people too, until it gets more safe and normal for all of us to see people be OK with the word gay. For the word gay to be boring would be ideal. For now I have the signs that say "Human Rights for ALL" and don't say gay in big letters. Because we are not there yet.

You can get a sign to print for your car or house. While the words don't have the force of law, with time they can show more people care, ordinary people everywhere around Idaho. That's what matters. And I feel pretty sure that, even without the word gay, people will know what we mean.

Horrible Power

No where in the legislature is our power as legislators more evident than on the Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee. There more than anywhere we are like godzilla-sided toddlers roaming across the landscape of government, too tall to see the detail of what's below, too big to look in the windows and figure out through the course of a year what's really going on. We rely on staff and I picture them some days like all too generous parents, gently trying to keep us from doing damage while providing us with everything we need in order to do what we will do each day.

With a single motion we can unexpectedly lay people off as we did with the office of species conservation last week. In my pink onesies I burped out the final deciding yes vote and they were gone.

With a single motion we can build a bit of a fervor around something and kill a whole agency as we did with the women's commission this morning. The $23,000 agency is gone. I was the only Democrat to vote yes for getting rid of it. My reasons were very different from my colleagues who claimed budget constraints and duplication. I voted to eliminate the Women's Commission because it is an absurd joke to expect a $23,000 agency with one part-time staff person to achieve pay equity and end disparities in the status of women in Idaho. Ending inequalities is not supposed to be like playing house. I don't think we as a legislature should get to put forward this agency to help us pretend this state government really cares.

We Can't Do it Alone

Carol and I ran up in the foothills this morning. Frozen sandy trails thread up along ridge tops for miles. We found ourselves in snow, brilliant white in the sun, cold on our tennis shoes.

Rough week trying to decide where to go from here as human rights issues appear so clearly to be slipping backward in Idaho.

There is irony in all this. Bryan Fischer says my election to the legislature means there is no problem with discrimination in Idaho. I had to laugh and then cry this morning on the trail running behind Carol on the frozen ground because that is so much like saying that, because we elected a fine man who happens to be black as our 44th president of the United States, that it follows logically that there is no longer racism or racist people in the United States, that we can just take black people out of Idaho’s Human Rights Act or federal anti-discrimination laws because no American will ever again perpetuate acts of racism, violence or discrimination against black people in schools or businesses or anyplace in our nation ever again.

....

So to that end I am going to ask a favor. If you care that gay people are ever fired from our jobs, denied raises or promotions, kicked out of our apartments, are harassed as teens and made unwelcome in school classrooms anywhere in this state, please do something about it this year.

1.    Email your friends these two links and ask them to help. 
Support your gay friends: http://www.4idaho.org/HumanRights/
POST THIS WINDOW SIGN: http://www.4idaho.org/vote/OurGayFriends-WindowSign.pdf
2.    Post a “Protect Our Gay Friends” Window sign in your car, house or workplace.
3.    Let YOUR three state legislators know that you feel it is time to end discrimination against gay people in employment, housing and education.
4.    Write a letter to the editor.
5.    Get involved this year when there is a chance to help an organization on this issue. (Show up, donate, take action.)

.....

It kills me that my work on sentencing or health care may suffer because it is not really the role of a legislator to be a community organizer. It kills me that some of my colleagues have said I have to make a choice, be a gay activist or have no future in politics in Idaho. Really I have no choice.

I think of the straight people I meet who clearly care and want to help.

The burly firefighter who told me he buttonholed Senator Fulcher at a recent reception to say firmly but politely how upset he was as a constituent that Fulcher had opposed the Human Rights act. I think of the man who came to me to talk about health care issues and, as he was leaving, mentioned how wrong it was that some radio talk show hosts were say such awful things about me and gay people.

I think of my friend Emilie Jackson-Edney and her wonderful conversations about gender identity with Senator Coiner.

I think of Mountain Goat, the blogger in Canyon County whose partner fears being fired from her job. I know this woman only by her pen name and her posts and I picture her these days settled next to a radio watching the hate stream out day after day because she knows someone has to say that this is wrong. She is so right. How can we as a state stand by when others incite violence and hate. Why are we not outraged? Or maybe we all are outraged and we don’t know how to express it.

Well, I’m offering some ways to express it. And I’m asking for your help. Because I can’t do this alone. The tiny cluster of under-funded, human rights oriented, non-profit groups who have worked on these issues for over a decade and have three staff between them, they can’t do this alone.

We all need your help this year because if we don’t have your help things will keep getting worse, not better. And like you, I just can’t bear that.

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.

Losing Ground in Silence

Sitting at my desk on the floor of the Senate. Outside it is growing warm and across Boise people are planting spinach.

Only one bill to go before we break for the weekend and all fly off home. I will fly the ten or so blocks home to dig my hands in the dirt and try to forget this day for just a few hours at least, just until it is time to start planning for how to change this downward slide in the advancement of our rights here in this tiny isolated red red state. Just a few hours until we can figure out how to end the silence and make this issue clear and unavoidable in every corner in every little town of this thawing state.

On a simple print hearing vote this morning where seven committee members heard from Senator Coiner first and then from me on why more than 42,000 people deserve to be able to work at their jobs, go to school and live in a house or apartment without fear, the senate state affairs committee voted five to two not to introduce the proposal as a bill.

Not to even give it the courtesy of print. Not to acknowledge that discrimination against gay people might be a problem worth discussing inside the state's law making body.

Clearly we have far far to go and need many more voices in there with ours because people all over this state live quietly in fear every day. In school rooms, in board rooms, at desks, in processing plants and apartment complexes. What are the values of a state which, by omission, condones discrimination year after year, whose law makers know better, but refuse to stand up and act.

The committee members asked not a single question. Senator Stegner, always valiant, made the motion to approve the introduction of the bill. Senator Kelly seconded. The committee was silent but for their brief voice vote. Five to two. No.

 

Being Brave for Gay People

Today listening to Senator Tom Gannon's memorial on the Senate floor, I remember how full of hope and optimism I was four years ago. My colleagues in the Senate collectively fended of an anti-gay constitutional amendment, standing up for us as gay people against intense political pressure.  Fourteen Senators stood, brave and eloquent. Tom Gannon was one of them.

It felt then like things could only get better, for our families and for safety and equality. But marriage became a tool of political power like the atomic bomb. It struck fear into the heart of every progressive law maker from here to Alaska and back. Those who once knew a line of discrimination they would not cross, lost that line in blind fear.

And our community here in Idaho grew understandably angry and bitter, even if briefly. And for those legislators who stood up for us once, the anger may be all they remember.

I hope not. I hope they remember the tears of relief after the vote in 2005. The flowers we sent. The cards and packages of candies. It was not that we gained any new rights in that vote. It was that we could remain in legal limbo for awhile more. And we did for another year until Idaho passed arguably one of the most restrictive Constitutional Amendments in the country.

I see the looks on other Senator's faces when I mention gays and lesbians. Do they think I love reminding them that I belong to a sub class of Idahoans that does not have the right to work at a job, attend a school in peace, hold a family gym membership or health insurance policy as they do? Do I love reminding them I belong to the group of people that can be forced to die alone in a hospital room; whose possessions at death can be distributed to estranged family members over the wishes of the immediate family because that family is not of the right gender.

Please tell me this all makes sense to someone.... outside religion, beyond what one person believes verses what another believes through their religious faith. Please tell me we have a legal and constitutional reason why I deserve less than those men and women I serve with every day. I am, in the words of others, a good person, a good Senator, a good hard working American, someone who has given of myself to my country and community. But I'm not good enough for equality for one small reason. A reason that affects no one in the whole world in a way that is not positive. My partner who served her country in the Air Force, is she less worthy of love or happiness? Of equality? Fairness? Respect? Humanity?

So yes to my colleagues, I am coming back this year to bother you, because you have not yet stood up again. So many of you are willing if only others will just be brave. This is the time to be brave. There is harm being done to good people every day we delay, every single day that we remain one of the few states that does not allow gay people the simple right to be employed, to go to school, to live somewhere regardless of who we love, who we have spent our lives with.

All of us can hide in that comfortable place where we don't have to educate our constituents or colleagues, where we don't have to be brave or take a stand on something hard. We can hide there forever and pretend that is OK. But I know so well how many of you have gay family members, sons , daughters, brothers, sisters. Each of you will think I'm talking about you, but I'm not. I'm talking about LOTS of you and you never talk to each other about it. And if you think your sons and daughters, nieces and nephews want to bring it up any more than I do... just imagine.

Where is the time for bravery? For justice? For eloquence? I can't do this alone. Believe me. Can we not be brave enough to make some step forward this year?


..............

Friday we have a hearing to amend the Idaho Human Rights Act to add sexual orientation and gender identity and to include protections for gay people in employment, housing and education. 8 AM Senate State Affairs Committee, Second Floor, Old Ada County Court House at 6th & State St.

If you care, please do not stand by this year. We need supporters, parents, employers, friends, students, landlords, farmers. This will not be a hearing for testimony, just for witness and to steel those we are asking to vote yes. There are nine members on the committee. Please bring cards, flowers, something to thank those who vote yes.

If you can not come but want to write a letter to the editor of your local paper big or small PLEASE do... especially those of you out there who have never written a letter to support us before.

Surreal

It is hard to describe this day. It has four main parts. I will try to explain it.

The first was about cutting millions out of budgets for the next six months. Those are the "holdbacks." They take money away from what we budgeted last year for January to June or the second half of "fiscal year 09."  I voted "no" on one of them, the one that took huge chunks out of several different parts of our "medicaid" health care and welfare budgets...

The second part of the day was a rally on the temporary statehouse steps where I climbed down through signs and bundled bodies to find hundreds of people with disabilities and their families gathered to protest huge pending cuts to the therapy services many depend on. They are concerned that without support and help that many there would never have had the chance to become as independent as they are. They are concerned that parents will have to ask taxpayers to foot the larger bill to put their kids in expensive homes and institutions; that they won't be able to work and care for their kids; that a traditional day care won't take them or if they do that their children will just be warehoused, not taught skills, independence and self esteem.

One man in a wheel chair who works with kids with developmental disabilities spoke slowly and, in his nervousness, almost incomprehensibly into the hand held microphone. Someone re-read his eloquent speech. In another time he might never have had a chance to use a computer to write that speech. He might have been assumed to have no intellect, no voice.

The third part of the day was where we sat and listened to Mike Ferguson from the Governor's budget office try to talk our committee down from the ledge. It seems we on the Revenue Outlook Committee (I sit on this and the budget committee, JFAC) are far less optimistic about the economy than the Governor. Each of us on the committee was supposed to guess how much in sales and income tax Idahoans will earn and spend and thus pay this year based on what economists and industry lobbyists themselves are predicting.

My number or revenue estimate was the smallest. and even the committee "median" or middle number was $101 million smaller than the Governor's. Again, it was $101 million smaller. This would mean that even the Governor's deep cuts will have to be deepened. We decided to go with the median. That is now what we on JFAC, the Joint Finace and Appropriations Committee, will have to spend as we set budgets this year. Hundreds of millions less than we had last year.

My number was very low. To some extent we discussed it and how low things really might go. I looked at my number and at the very low committee median and thought what another $101 million of shortfall will mean to people all over Idaho. I can only hope I am very wrong, that a year from now we can all laugh at my doom. I have never wanted to be wrong so much in my whole life.

The final part of the day was a meeting with the people from Medicaid. The gate keepers. Someone once called them the bean counters. I don't think the name was chosen by someone who thinks well of counting beans. These men and women have the dreadful job of deciding who gets help with medical care and who does not, how much, at what cost, and what will not be covered and under what circumstances. I suppose if you continually give people like this less money and fewer people to work with at lower and lower wages, what happens is they get a bit cold and hard. They learn to hate the waste and ugliness in things rather than seeing the beauty and the value.

The bean counters have to work with a system of private providers, some of who are in it because they have a passion for improving the lives of people with disabilities. Some are in it because there is money to be made. If i was ever not a fan of privatization, I really am not now. If it does not open up the most vulnerable of our society to exploitation, then at least it makes us fear that everyone providing the services is trying to exploit the system, even if they are not.

It is like the way some of my legislative colleagues have described people with disabilities, or their parents, as being able to do nothing for themselves. In this fourth and final part of the day, one person in the room said that the families who wrote to him, the very same as those families on the steps, expected the state to do everything for them.

As someone who benefited from special education as a child and who worked as a personal care attendant through part of college, I never in my life expected to hear words like those out of the mouth of someone I know and care about.

How hard is it to describe living with a single desire just to be able to do EVERYTHING for yourself. Not to need people to open doors for you, not to have more time on tests, not to need an adaptive device or to be able to afford one and have it always work. How do you describe a family that needs to pay the rent like any other but where for her entire life their daughter can not be left alone. How do you describe how hard people work just to be allowed to hold jobs or finish a sentence just explaining how they feel.

At the Doors of Justice

Nicole's speech on LGBT equality at Boise City Hall at noon Saturday, January 10th 2009.

Friends, Idahoans we have struggled for decades and millennia up a steep hill toward the doors of the house of justice….

In small towns we’ve lived quietly hoping to pass unnoticed.
We’ve been taunted, harassed and demonized.
Millions of us have cried in school hallways, alone in bathrooms and school yards.
We’ve taken our lives as teens and adults broken in half unable to bear a life alone in hostility.
We’ve lost jobs, families, churches, children.
We’ve been told we deserve hate, deserve loneliness
and only rarely from above in the house of justice has anyone shone a light into the darkness for us, has anyone tried to help us up that hill from above
---only rarely from that place of power has anyone ever even said our names.

Friends, five years ago from his speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004 Barack Obama said our names. Unlike any politician speaking to a prime time audience on a national stage he spoke to us, his “gay friends in red states,” including us then in his vision of American.

From drag queens standing up to police brutality on the shores of the Atlantic to Harvey Milk dying at the hands of hatred in a marble building in another city far away on the Pacific…… we have worked toward justice again and again only to be sent back down the hill yet further time and time again into the mire.

Friends, today as we stand here in the cold, Soldiers, men and women serving in Iraq face worse consequence for living as human beings than they did twelve years ago. They are told today that it is dishonorable to be both patriotic and honest. They are told in US law, something no American should ever be told. They are told that to protect their livelihood, their careers and their families, they must lie.

What kind of a nation holds up gay Americans as heroes in the arts, in sports, in entertainment and even politics, and then with laws tells us that in one place we can marry, can have all the rights of our straight brothers and sisters, but that on the other side of a boarder, on a different date in the same city that those rights and duties and privileges, the very keys of full personhood are not ours to have.

Friends we have climbed up the hill for a long, long time and we have slid back in the mud of hate, greed and partisan politics, but today we stand here in Boise, Idaho, ten days from the day that Barack Obama, a community organizer, state legislator, US Senator, writer and diplomat…. one who has struggled for decades beside us…. we stand here ten days from the day that he will walk through those doors of justice himself.

He will bring part of the nation with him through those doors on the 20th of January.

Friends, we are there almost to those the doors ourselves today. It may not be this month or this year that we achieve full equality but I’ve looked three times into the eyes of the man who will be our new president and I know he has a fire in him for justice.

If any man can sit in that white house on that hill and ask a nation to change not just its laws but its minds for us, it will be him.

We know he can not do it alone. All across the nation today and over the next months and year we will be gathering on the lawns of houses of justice and asking not just a man, but a nation to hear us. We will be standing here as long as it takes, with our families and co-workers, church members, neighbors and class mates beside us, now, for the sake of justice, equality and all that makes us a nation, it is time for Congress and for our state legislatures, our courts and our neighbors to speak our names in respect and in law…… and to finally let us in.

Sitting Down with the Reverend

It is a bit hard listening as our nation grapples with the role of religion in government and the right of religious institutions to define marriage, or to grant or deny marriage to me or to people I love. Right now too, debate rages about how we make change and who has to be at the table to get down this last bit of road to legal equality. Do we need anti-gay religious leaders at the nation's table or will that set us back and turn progress into hate?

I don't think we can deny that if we want equality, we have to change some minds. President Obama surely knows he has to change some minds.

On most issues like employment discrimination our country is there with us in agreement that firing people because they are gay is wrong. On marriage we are tipping in a balance. Those who have lived in states where we can marry, seem to find the ominous mystery gone. In other states the level of comfort is not yet there. The conversation has not been had.

Real change is a process. As a law maker, I know well that to pass the actual laws (which community  organizers and brave people for decades have worked to prepare the ground for,) we still need to remind Congress how ready our nation is for change. We need huge numbers of people to stand up with us on the issue of legal equality. We as a community need to be visible and to ask our straight friends to help.

Sadly, laws are a measure of progress long over due, but they alone can't protect every one of us in every small town from Burley, Idaho to Bangor Maine. We need national leaders and neighbors who stand up with us before we will get there.

To see real change, those who still hate or fear us as gay people have to see us as human and see our lives through our eyes just a little.

Getting there is slow. It takes time and serious patience to listen to another person's story and to hear it without judgement and make sure they hear a bit of your story as well. Remember that people are raised to hate. It is not spontaneous. You have to be willing to know you won't change someone's mind in one conversation, which means of course that if you are disrespectful in that first conversation you never get to come back and keep working at helping them see what it is like to have a government nullify your marriage or stand by when you are harassed or fired from a job you loved for no other reason than that you happen to be gay.

I would never say we can not be angry. In an era where our culture so seems to embrace our roles in art, science, politics, education, sports and the military, how can our government stand by while a very few work to deny us legal equality? I still get teary listening to NPR trying to comprehend how anyone could go so far as to intentionally hurt loving people who are just trying to live their lives and protect their families under the law.

We can't pretend we are not angry. How can we not be angry sometimes right now? But to get this last distance to legal equality, we as gay people will have to be very disciplined. We have to be calm and focused on the change we have to bring.

It may feel frightening, but if we want a seat at the table we will will have to sit down with people we don't agree with, with some who have not shown us respect in the past. We can not change every mind, but by calmly organizing and working hard to show what is lost to this culture without our contributions, to show the harm from the laws and amendments passed, and to accept that good people can have awful beliefs, we can I think help our country travel this last bit of road.

Survival

...

Put the head phones on and wow. Here I am. The message-focused, issue-automaton that I become falls away and its just me here at the computer on the floor listening to Taj Mahal, Tracy Chapman and Concrete Blonde. I've literally been too busy spinning here between committee and balcony, key board and sleep to dig out the ear phones and listen to music here since weeks back in February.

    We are far from there now. Today I went to the press conference which some of Boise's stalwart Human Rights organizations had pulled together, there out on the lawn as the rain turned to white snow. We discussed Senate Bill 1323... a bill saying I, as a gay person, am human. I matter. Saying that this state agrees that harm against me is not OK. Saying that firing me or throwing me out of my apartment for no other reason than that I'm gay is not O.K. What state or nation would not up hold that value?

    Odd day today. Full of odd moments. I've written so much e-mail that my brain now naturally streams bill phrases, numbers, consequences, debate. The music here in the head phones reminds me that I can survive anything, even as good bills go down and bad ones creep ever forward. If it all gets to me for a day or two each session, I'm doing pretty well. I have a well of strength from many places. Carol's brilliant humor, my years in the wilds, having seen a world where I know never to pity myself too much. I've seen lives people live elsewhere in the world. I can survive anything here.

Here's one I will share....... Having walked alone for hours following foot prints, through deep snow at first, and then downhill for miles along the winding dirt road out of a Tibetan mountain town through forest, toward the boarder with Nepal. An army jeep stopped and I took a ride with a group of Chinese military men in uniform. It was a ride that I know from the faces and voices there in the cramped seats very nearly went wrong. I speak no Chinese only some Nepali and when I insisted on getting out, I was on a huge hill side above the boarder gate. Rocks fell constantly across the road from high up in the rain and I threaded my way down huge switchbacks until a voice below the road called out. An old man sat there under a low piece of corrugated metal. He invited me in with hand gestures. Leaning over a little fire, he made Tibetan tea for me, a kind of salty yellow soup made with yack butter. He showed me how to dip little dough balls made from tsampa flour into the warm broth and I sat with him, communicating with gestures and smiles there in his shelter of tin by the road side where he had pulled me out of the rain to share with me what food he had.

Ending Debate

White haired Reverend of anti-gay causes, Brian Fischer, caught up with me in the brown marble stair case last week. He wanted to tell me that he wants us to get along. I said, as long as you are pushing legislation which affects my life, that will be hard. He said he didn't want it to be personal. I said, it's my life, my family. That is personal.

    Oddly, Reverend Fischer nodded. When you debate him on issues he doesn't give up. Like with me, there is no end to it with him. I guess that's because you can't debate different values and priorities. If one person thinks another is unworthy of rights and they see that belief as sanctioned in their religious documents, how do you debate that? You can debate whether their religion should be expressed in Idaho law, but can not really debate the belief itself. But Fischer looked up and nodded on the stairway landing below me, almost understandingly at last, and turned away.

Race in Debate

If you watch our House floor session each morning at from about 10 AM to noon on line or on public TV, you might have watched some pretty disturbing debate on the grocery tax on Thursday. The 70 of us debated a bill to offer a $30 rebate on your income tax which would climb each year by $10 until it reaches $100. It was one of those moments at which I cringed to be debating along side some of my colleagues on an issue I opposed for completely different reasons.
    Phil Hart was debating against the bill and began by expressing concerns about how people, especially low income people would spend the rebate, which would be as much as $50 even the first year if your income were low enough. He went on for some time about "illegal aliens" and must have said that phrase literally 15 times in only a few minutes. It seems that the proponents of the credit didn't want to take the tax off food because illegal aliens and tourists in Sun Valley might benefit from the tax cut.
    I am supposing some think it doesn't get any scarier to Republican law makers than to contemplate a few women in furs and Lycra and some unfortunate person whose visa has expired while her husband's has not and she chooses to stay in Idaho rather than leaving the kids. Phil did not dwell on the tourists, only those whose "illegal culture" means they have a lot of kids.
    Phil mentioned some odd statistic about how people spent relief money from Katrina. It wasn't flattering either and I'm guessing was only part of the real story, omitting the people who paid for caskets and house repairs, clothes to replace molded ones soaked in sewage and long gone. I wondered if Phil would ever feel comfortable if people analyzed how he spent his money. I listened and he went on.
     Next he talked about Idaho's tribes and I cannot for the life of me remember how they were connected because I was on my phone to our Democratic Minority Leader Wendy Jaquet downstairs telling her I was going to stand up and object. She said she'd do it. And so the debate came back to food tax rebates.
    I know well that not every undocumented immigrant in Idaho is Latino and not every person living in New Orleans is black.  Still, later I found Phil at the shooting range and with a smile and pointed humor, gave him a big whack on the arm, explaining that using negative examples ranging from undocumented immigrants to Katrina to Idaho's tribes was debate chock full of pretty dreadful racist innuendo. He said we all see things from different points of view. I agreed. He smiled sheepishly and said he didn't mean it. I actually believe he didn't. I also expect he might be more thoughful next time. 

Triumph of Cynicism

....

Wednesday: I feel like this sinister force is pressing down on this place, like our ugliest, most fearful natures are lurking at the surface, scratching the eyes out of our collective conscience.
    The bean counters are stuffing our ears with starch, pulling the alarm on sirens which have deafened our sense to what is possible. It has driven us into isolation, frozen us spineless in our big, black leather chairs.
    The Darfur divestment bill is dead. Created with the authorization of congress and the president as part of a coordinated strategy to impact the genocide and violent and systematic extermination of a people in Sudan.
    The one chance our nation and state has to make a difference and we fall, believing the whispers that this will be but one of a series of divestment requests -- as if national efforts are coordinated through federal legislation every year and as if the genocide of a group of people is acknowledged by world leaders and our own president each year.
    PERSI, the Public Employee Retirement System, insists we are powerless and thus we became so.
    PERSI insists it has no role in public policy yet invested hundreds of hours in defeating this bill, organizing public employee organizations, the Idaho Education Association and Firefighters to oppose Divestment.
    PERSI knows that only one third of one percent of its holdings would be divested and that the list of companies it must avoid is created nationally, yet the managers claim a great burden in having to comply with this divestment legislation. In fact the burden and cost has been their hours spent fighting Divestment itself.
    They insist we should have no role in the world, as if our actions are monetarily and materially isolated. This is the ugliest cynicism. I know because I sat in a college amphitheater in 1986 and listened to Reverend Desmond Tutu's thanks for my work and the work of thousands of students to bring down the Apartheid government in South Africa through Divestment and the public awareness and international pressure which Divestment created.
    Tutu was a man who spent his life struggling to end the rule of white government which made him, as a black man, a second class citizen with no right to work or pursue freedom and or participate in his country's political process as an equal. The Apartheid government was condemned worldwide. This was arguably the only other major Divestment movement in the US in the past three decades. Tutu knew the power of dollars and the power of coordinated international efforts. I know that power and I know that as a state we have that power, and with a small action like adopting this legislation we could have been a part of something larger, part of a strategy carefully targeted to place pressure where it is most needed to end violence and bring down a government which is not just cordoning off an ethnic group within its borders, but killing them, to the best of its ability, trying to kill all of them. And do we really feel we have no choice as a state but to stand by and watch?
    I think we know better. I think members of the State Affairs Committee, especially McKenzie, a former co-sponsor, knew better. With this vote, what really have we become?

At the Movies

Last night was Skip Smyser's Movie night. Smyser is a former legislator and long time lobbyist who holds an annual legislator and legislative staff Movie Night at the Egypitan Theater. People come dressed down. The house and Senate mix, sitting in seats right next to each other (unheard of.) And we sit back, eat popcorn and get transported together somewhere far away and usually long, long ago.
    I admire Smyser for his choice of movies. He often has a sort of transcending message he feels we need to hear, about the integrity of the law (A Man for All Seasons), racism (South Pacific), being different (To Kill a Mocking Bird). I look forward to these nights not just because so far they have all been movies I've never seen, but also just to look into the eyes of my colleagues afterwards, to ask their thoughts and see what they saw in a film. It gives me hope and re-affirms what we often have in common.
    One Hundred and five people from around the state, gathered each year to make law. We are not quite ordinary people. We had the ego to run for office and believe we could win. We had to have the means to give up a job and do so. We had to be elected by a majority and so the majority in the state is better represented than it might be if we just drew lots.
   I like nights like last night because we step away from the issues that divide us for a few hours and become ordinary people again.  In my heart I hope it helps the process. I also hope the words of the song from South Pacific about being taught prejudice, it not being born in you, ring in 105 ears when we discuss immigration or gay people, when we talk about people who live in poverty and in wealth and about hard work and worthiness. We have a long way to go together. I always hope that nights like last night rub a little armor off of each of us and inch us one step closer.

Messages Sent

Tense days. Finalizing legislation, seeing the deadlines looming. The friction is palpable among factions of our Republican colleagues over brewing debates about the grocery tax, open or closed primaries and more. Everyone seems yet more on edge as we close the week. Some of us stay late calculating fiscal impacts, writing statements of purpose (SPOs) which you find at the bottom of the bills on the legislative web site. In committee they appear as a sort of green cover sheet on a House bill (yellow on Senate bills.) They say what legislation does and why we feel it is necessary.
    This afternoon in the Senate, a long list of us as Senators and representatives, expect to introduce the bill to get PERSI, our public employee retirement system, to divest from Darfur. If we pass it, we sell .03% or less than one third of a percent of the stocks PERSI holds. Those oil, weapons and other companies sit on a list of businesses flagged nationally as contributing significantly to genocide in Sudan. If we pass this bill we join congress and the even the president and send a message that we won't participate in the deaths and torture of thousands in Africa, where, far off there today, it is nighttime in the heat of summer.

A Little History Made

This morning the Idaho legislature made a little history. On this day when we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the Senate State Affairs Committee voted to print the first piece of legislation to mention sexual orientation, and to propose ending centuries of discrimination against gays and lesbians in employment, housing, education and public accommodation.
    Leslie Goddard, director of the Human Rights Commission beautifully presented the bill after an introduction by Senator Tim Corder, a major sponsor or the legislation. Some may remember the Mountain Home Republican Senator from a City Club debate in 2006 or from his past vote to ban gay marriage in Idaho's Constitution. His support of this year's legislation speaks loudly to the fundamental fairness implicit in the issue of employment discrimination and to the progress made on understanding of these issues over the years.
    Nothing, except giving thanks to those who vote well, is more important than dedicating ourselves to having positive, gentle interactions with legislators who are still on the road to understanding these issues and voting as we would wish. I will never fault a community frustrated with waiting so many long years to see a day when we can not be fired from our jobs solely because we are gay. Still, I hope it is well noted that Senator Little was one of the majority voting yes in support this morning, the man who bravely helped hold off the Constitutional Amendment for two years before bowing to extremely intense political pressure. Again his vote speaks to the importance of patience and how different and fundamental this issue is from marriage which so unfortunately intersects with church and religion.
    In what I hope will help bolster a budding coalition of conservatives and moderates, the BSU public policy survey this year found that 63% or Idahoans feel it should be illegal to fire someone just because they are or are perceived to be gay, that was a majority in every region of the state and both political parties.  Clearly those numbers take this out of the realm of being election year issue and show that basic fairness crosses all kinds of political lines. Who today doesn't know someone affected by this issue? In fact, how many legislators still do not have a family member or friend who is touched by what we deliberate today?

Yes votes (note some legislators were absent): Sen Pro Tem Robert Geddes, Committee Chair Curt McKenzie, Senator Joe Steger, Senator Brad Little, Senator Kate Kelly, Senator Clint Stennett

Being Gay

Carol Growhoski / Nicole LeFavour 2006

Some days it is harder than others to be the only gay person in the legislature. Ninety nine percent of the time there is no reason for me to feel it. My colleagues ask about my partner Carol. When I talk about what I did over the weekend I might say "Carol and I." I don't think much about it and I don't think they do either. At least not most of them.
    Rep. Curtis Bowers wrote a pretty frightening anti-gay editorial to the Idaho Press Tribune the other day. Bowers was appointed by Governor Otter this year to fill Rep. Bob Ring's seat. Dr. Ring is one of a group of Republican senators and representative who voted against the anti-gay constitutional amendment when he served in the house. Today I miss him more than ever.
    I imagine some days it is not easy for Raul Labrador listening to the debates around immigration and how they so easily flow into anti-Mexican, anti-Hispanic and racially stereotyping tirades. It is an odd feeling to know that someone you work with doesn't just perhaps disagree with your ideas or beliefs but feels that you as a person are lesser or evil or by virtue of your existence deserving of pain or derision. 
    Representative Bowers sits behind me here on the balcony of the House. I stood up a bit ago and went back to tell him how uncomfortable his editorial made me and how sorry I was to see he felt that way about gay people. He was willing to talk more about it. I offered to answer questions when he has them.
    I don't know if it will ever really make any difference since I understand he is a strong John Birch Society devotee. But I want him to see me as human. Even if he never votes in a way that shows he respects or cares about gay people, I want him to see me as human.