An Idaho man was arrested for allegedly assaulting a gay couple outside a restaurant. But despite allegations that Pedro Villareal hurled antigay slurs before beating two men, authorities charged him only with a misdemeanor and said the state’s hate crime law doesn’t apply.
Caldwell Police say Villareal and other men started shouting slurs at Eric Reed and Juan Olvera outside Acapulco, a restaurant in town, and then chased them from a plaza to nearby railroad tracks, according to Boise TV station KTVB. There, the victims told police, Villareal allegedly began assaulting them. The attack left Reed’s lip split and required six stitches.
Reed and Olvera later sat down with the TV station, where Reed described the fear he experienced during the attack. “I literally felt they were going to kill us for being gay,” Olvera said. “It’s a scary thing to live through, and I never would wish this on anyone.”
But police said Villareal won’t face hate crime charges, even though law enforcement officials said they would like to pursue them. That’s because Idaho state law doesn’t cover crimes based on sexual orientation or gender identity as acts of hate.
“We’re here to serve the citizens of Caldwell and Idaho, and unfortunately, when we’re unable to give them the justice that they feel that they need, under the application of the law, it is frustrating,” Lt. Jeffrey Peterson, a spokesperson for Caldwell Police, told the news outlet.
That’s not the first time the limitation in Idaho’s state law has prevented prosecutors from pursuing hate crime allegations.
Matthew Alan Lehigh was arrested by Boise Police in 2023 and charged with aggravated assault, malicious injury to property, and arson after a string of crimes that included allegedly trying to drive a car into a gay couple after vandalizing an LGBTQ+ center and a Pride flag at the couple’s home. It wasn’t until federal prosecutors stepped in, however, that Lehigh faced any hate crime charges despite clear evidence of anti-LGBTQ+ motivation.
But despite individuals being victimized based on gender identity and sexual orientation, Idaho’s hate crime statute covers only harassment and targeting of victims based on “race, color, religion, ancestry, or national origin.”
Civil rights groups, including the ACLU of Idaho, have campaigned for years to “add the words” and update the state’s hate crime and non-discrimination laws.
A recent court hearing on a lawsuit brought by six transgender Idahoans against the state’s latest bathroom bill has revealed just how unworkable the draconian new law would be. In fact, to enforce it, an attorney for the red state said restroom users might need to undergo forced DNA testing.
House Bill 752, which passed the Legislature this year with only Republican votes, prohibits trans people from using public restrooms that match their gender identity, both in government-owned buildings and private businesses that serve the public.
The law is set to take effect July 1.
The suit says the Idaho law — one of three recently passed by Republican legislatures that impose criminal penalties on offenders — violates the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights to due process, equal protection, and privacy. The challenge was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of Idaho, and Lambda Legal.
At the hearing, the judge in the case — Chief U.S. District Judge for the District of Idaho, Amanda K. Brailsford — questioned the state over how exactly they would determine the sex at birth of an individual accused of violating the law, The Idaho Capital Sun reports.
Kell Olson, a trans attorney for Lambda Legal, told the judge that if police confronted him and asked for his ID, officers would find that his ID lists him as male. Brailsford noted, for the record, that most of the plaintiffs suing the state also have state-issued IDs with gender markers that are aligned with their gender identity.
Idaho Solicitor General Michael Zarian suggested the solution was simple: “There is DNA testing.”
Pressed on whether DNA testing required consent, Zarian hedged, saying that wasn’t necessarily the case and that he doubted the accused would be asked to undergo DNA testing on the spot.
Lambda’s Olson told the court that DNA testing usually requires a warrant.
Both the Idaho Sheriffs’ Association and the Idaho Fraternal Order of Police called the proposed law impractical and unworkable.
There is no “clear or reasonable way” to determine a person’s sex at birth during a field contact without engaging in “invasive and inappropriate” questioning or searches, said one police group president.
Following the hearing, ACLU of Idaho attorney Emily Croston said the state didn’t help itself on the issue of enforcement.
“I don’t think the state has an answer for how you identify someone’s biological sex,” Croston told reporters. “Are we just going to look at folks as they enter a restroom and determine whether we think they look enough like a man or a woman? That’s ridiculous.”
The hearing only reinforced the plaintiffs’ argument that the law is unconstitutionally vague, and police organizations’ earlier doubts that it’s practically unenforceable.
Proving the former claim, Solicitor General Zarian tried using an exemption in the law to demonstrate how reasonable the ban is. The law allows individuals to use restrooms that don’t align with their sex if they are in “dire need” of going to the bathroom, he pointed out.
Pressed by Judge Brailsford, Zarian acknowledged that it “might be difficult to prove someone had a dire need,” but that vagueness, he claimed, doesn’t mean that the law itself is unconstitutionally vague.
Idaho law enforcement didn’t have to similarly tie themselves in knots when they formally opposed the ban during debate in the Legislature earlier this year. Both the Idaho Sheriffs’ Association and the Idaho Fraternal Order of Police called the proposed law impractical and unworkable.
There is no “clear or reasonable way” to determine a person’s sex at birth during a field contact without engaging in “invasive and inappropriate” questioning or searches, said one police group president.
The ACLU notes that analyses of public safety data have found policies inclusive of transgender people’s access to public accommodations have no impact on rates of harassment or violence, while policies that restrict access actually increase the risk of harassment and violence. Trans people are four times as likely as their cisgender peers to be the victims of violence.
Nine bathroom bans have passed by red state legislatures in recent years, but Idaho’s is the only one to cover private businesses as well as government buildings. A first offense is a misdemeanor, with up to one year in prison; a second offense jumps to a felony, with up to five years in prison.
A fourth violation would constitute a third felony conviction, punishable under Idaho’s persistent violator statute by a mandatory minimum of five years and up to life in prison.
An index that measures state-level LGBTQ+ inclusion for business leaders has measured a national decline in support for the LGBTQ+ community for the fourth consecutive year.
Released this month, the eighth annual State LGBTQ+ Business Climate Index examines states across five main categories: legal protections, family support, political and religious attitudes, health care and employment. The index is published by OutLeadership, an LGBTQ+ business network.
This year’s report found that states that rank low in the index are performing worse year over year, and that fewer states are placing toward the middle of the 100-point index scale. The states with the lowest rankings were Arkansas, Tennessee, Idaho, South Carolina and Florida in that order.
LGBTQ+ rights are under attack across the United States, especially in Republican-led states, and polling suggests that support for LGBTQ+ rights is declining nationally. The American Civil Liberties Union is tracking more than 530 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in state legislatures in 2026 alone. The worsening support index this year was driven by states adopting anti-trans bans around bathrooms, sports, pronoun usage and gender-affirming care, plus efforts to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programming on the federal and state levels, according to the report.
“The gap between inclusive and hostile states is wider than it has ever been, and it is still widening,” wrote Out Leadership CEO Todd Sears in an introduction to this year’s report. “For businesses, this means the cost of operating across a fractured regulatory landscape has never been higher, and the return on choosing to lead has never been greater.”
The purpose of the report is to help business leaders make decisions and reflect on economic development as it relates to the LGBTQ+ community.
“Multinational companies face operational and reputational risks when they do business in places where the legal and social atmosphere makes it difficult for LGBTQ+ people to live openly,” the report states.
This year, Out Leadership expanded evaluation criteria for its report to assess issues like bathroom bans, book access, drag performance legality, and LGBTQ+-inclusive government data collection. “If we had kept the Index frozen in its original form, we would be measuring a country that no longer exists,” the report says.
Despite an overall performance decline, the report also found that top-performing states regarding LGBTQ+ rights are only strengthening their protections for LGBTQ+ residents. The 10 best-performing states in this year’s index include Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Illinois, rounding out the top five, respectively, which have all “been fixtures in the top tier for the entire history of the index,” according to this year’s report.
The parents of a young trans woman in Idaho say that they’re leaving their state after it passed a law to criminalize trans people who use the restroom.
“Obviously, this law is a disaster for families like ours,” Michael Devitt, the father of 20-year-old Eve, wrote in a letter notifying his patients that his physical therapy practice would be shutting down. “We can no longer take a road trip across our beloved state, or even enjoy a family night out at a restaurant, or a movie, without running the risk of Eve being charged and sent to a prison merely for using the facilities.”
The law he’s referring to is H.B. 752, which Gov. Brad Little (R) signed into law on March 31, the Trans Day of Visibility. The hostile law makes it a criminal offense for trans people to use the restroom that aligns with their gender identity, even in private businesses. Multiple offenses could get a trans person life in prison.
While several states have passed bathroom bills, Idaho is one of only four states – along with Florida, Kansas, and Utah – to introduce criminal penalties for using the restroom.
Eve Devitt, who is attending college in New York, testified against a different transphobic bill several years ago.
“Since I started estrogen almost three whole years ago, my mental health has gotten significantly better,” she told the Idaho House Judiciary, Rules, and Administration committee in 2023. “I’ve been able to get myself off of a cliff that I wasn’t sure if I would ever find myself off of. I feel so much better and more complete with myself.”
But today the Devitts say they’ve had enough, comparing their state to an abusive partner.
“We say ‘We’re in an abusive relationship with the state of Idaho’ — all people with transgender relatives, or all transgender people. And you always think, ‘Oh, they’ll stop hitting me.’ But they’re not gonna,” Michael Devitt told the Idaho Capital-Sun. He said that H.B. 752’s penalties for multiple offenses are more than the prison sentence someone in the state could get for manslaughter.
“I mean, there are all kinds of things you can do in Idaho that will get you prison time that are less than the second offense for using the bathroom that aligns with your gender identity.”
He said that even though his daughter is in New York at the moment, he worries about how she’ll be treated when she comes home to Boise. For example, he’s worried she’ll be forced to undergo a physical exam in public.
“Every single day when I’m out in public, I have to decide: Do I feel like going to jail today, or do I feel like being attacked?” said Nikson Mathews, a trans man and the chair of the Idaho Democratic Queer Caucus, about the new law.
Eve’s mother, Dr. Angie Devitt, said that she would continue to see patients in Idaho even after the family moves to another state.
H.B. 752 is one of three anti-LGBTQ+ laws passed in Idaho this year. H.B. 561, which was also signed on the Trans Day of Visibility, bans local governments from flying Pride flags. The state passed a similar ban last year that had an exemption for official city flags, so the city of Boise made the Pride flag one of its official flags. The GOP-controlled legislature responded this year by passing another flag ban that said flags had to be officially adopted before 2023 to count, just to keep Boise from flying the Pride flag.
And last Friday, Gov. Little signed the “Pediatric Secretive Transitions Parental Rights Act,” which requires doctors and teachers to report gender non-conforming kids to their parents without investigating whether those children will face abuse if outed.
The Idaho Capital-Sun reports that a fourth anti-LGBTQ+ bill could still be passed by the legislature. House Bill 557, which would ban local governments from enacting LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination protections, passed the Idaho House of Representatives but has stalled in the state Senate. Twelve local governments have passed ordinances that would be repealed by this bill if it passes.
Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) signed a severe anti-trans bill into law last Friday that will require child care providers, health care providers, and educational institutions to out trans kids to their parents if they express any desire to act in a way perceived as discordant with their sex assigned at birth.
The Pediatric Secretive Transitions Parental Rights Act, which will take effect in July, bans folks who care for minors “from facilitating a pediatric sex transition or social transition without informing and obtaining informed consent from a minor child’s parents or guardians.”
The bill aims to close a “loophole” in the state’s anti-trans laws, as cosponsor state Sen. Ben Toews (R) reportedly put it during the state Senate’s debate on the legislation. That loophole, Toews said, is the fact that the state’s gender-affirming care ban does not cover social transitions, which he referred to as “the process by which vulnerable children are led into the pipeline.”
The legislation defines social transition as “the process by which an individual goes from identifying with and living as a gender that corresponds to the individual’s sex to identifying with and living as a gender different from the individual’s sex and may involve social, legal, or physical changes, including adopting a name, pronouns, appearance, or dress that does not correspond to the individual’s sex.”
The covered entities, then, must notify a student’s parents within 72 hours if they request to be referred to using new pronouns or a different name than their legal name; if they ask to use facilities like bathrooms and locker rooms that don’t correspond with their sex assigned at birth; or if they ask to join a sports team that does not align with their birth sex.
Not doing so, the bill says, means “aiding and abetting” a child’s transition before parental consent is obtained. Parents will also be allowed to sue entities for violating the bill, and the attorney general will be authorized to seek civil penalties of up to $100,000.
Democrats argued against the bill for its vague language and the possibility that it would put children with unaccepting families in unsafe situations.
“When we write these bills, we write these statutes, we’re writing them for all families,” argued state Sen. James Ruchti (D), according to the Idaho Statesman. “And so when nurses, when doctors, when educators, tell us we need a little room to be able to handle these situations carefully… and being required to report this within 72 hours takes that out of our hands, and it means that we have to possibly go to a family… and tell them something that that family may not be in a great place to hear.”
State Sen. Melissa Wintrow (D) called the bill “one more that’s just overcontrolling overreach and just goes far beyond what’s necessary.”
“Life isn’t that black and white,” she said.
A lone Republican, state Sen. Jim Guthrie, spoke out against the bill, saying it will “force our teachers to be tattletales” and “put additional stress on teachers that are already stressed… already overworked, and more and more they have to deal with laws like this that are going to force them within 72 hours to make a judgment.”
After the legislature passed the bill, ACLU of Idaho spokesperson Rebecca De León called it an “example of unconstitutional, big government overreach into our private lives.”
“HB 822 threatens to undermine bedrock free speech protections for students, teachers, and health care professionals and is clearly unconstitutional,” she said. “Politicians who stand for small government and personal liberties should not regulate how people dress or express themselves.”
Jane Migliara Brigham, a writer for trans news publication The Needle, slammed the bill for turning doctors, teachers, and the like into “a kind of gender secret police.”
“The language is written such that there is no clear limit on what does not constitute social transition,” Brigham explained. “As a result, whether or not some behavior which is not listed here actually constitutes social transition will be in the eye of the beholder, or more accurately, in the eye of whoever is reporting the behavior to the child’s parents. This ambiguity leaves room for personal judgment, especially where that judgment is informed by anti-trans bigotry.”
Brigham questioned whether a boy wearing pink could count as evidence of a social transition and whether the legislation does not make clear where such an act would fall.
“Most casual observers cannot reliably tell the difference between a child who is trans, gay, gender non-conforming, or one who is simply socially awkward. As a result, what does and does not get reported to parents will, in all likelihood, be determined by bigotry and stereotypes, rather than any clear guidelines.”
At the end of March, Little also signed the nation’s most extreme bathroom ban. The law is the fourth in the U.S. to criminalize trans people’s use of bathrooms and other sex segregated spaces that don’t match the sex they were assigned at birth — similar laws have been enacted in Florida, Kansas, and Utah.
Guthrie was again the lone Republican against the bill. “If [a trans woman goes] in the bathroom of their biological sex, they’re going to upset a lot of people and freak people out,” he told the Associated Press. “If they go in the bathroom that is consistent with their looks — they are knowingly and willingly going into the bathroom — that is breaking the law.”
“They’re human beings,” he said, “just like us, and what are they supposed to do?”
An increasing number of U.S. states have passed laws that allow health care providers – including doctors, nurses and pharmacists – to refuse to treat patients based on their personal or religious beliefs. While these conscientious objection laws have long existed for issues such as abortion, their effects on LGBTQ+ people have not been well studied.
Specifically looking at sexual minorities, our research found that lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer adults living in states that passed conscientious objection laws were 28% less likely to report receiving a first-time HIV test, compared to peers in states without conscientious objection laws. These laws did not affect HIV testing rates for heterosexual adults.
We analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the health outcomes of more than 109,000 lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer and heterosexual adults from 2016 to 2018. We focused on eight states, comparing two that enacted conscientious objection laws during that period (Illinois and Mississippi) and six that did not (Louisiana, Minnesota, Ohio, Texas, Wisconsin and Virginia).
To isolate the effect of the laws themselves, we compared changes in health outcomes among LGBQ+ and heterosexual adults living in states with or without religious exemptions to health care, both before and after the laws passed. Making all these comparisons at once allowed us to identify differences in health outcomes due to the laws rather than preexisting differences between states.
Our findings highlight how laws permitting clinicians to refuse to provide health care to LGBQ+ patients deepen existing health disparities. Notably, conscientious objection laws are just one type of policy restricting LGBTQ+ people’s access to health care.
HIV preexposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, can lower the risk of contracting HIV from sex by 99%. However, patients are required to receive an HIV test before PrEP can be prescribed. If providers are unwilling or unable to engage with LGBQ+ patients on their sexual health, people who could benefit most from HIV prevention tools, such as PrEP, may never receive them.
Moreover, since the risk of contracting HIV is closely linked to the social determinants of health, such as having safe and stable housing and employment, barriers to HIV testing could further widen health gaps.
Acknowledging the health consequences of conscientious objection laws could help policymakers and the public better understand their impact.
A 2026 national study found that Americans were more motivated to support policies that address LGBTQ+ inequality when these laws were framed as improving health inequality rather than economic inequality or sense of belonging. This finding suggests that people perceive health inequality as unjust and are less likely to blame LGBTQ+ individuals for those circumstances.
The city of Boise won’t take “no” for an answer. Republicans said no Pride flags, so the mayor responded with Pride “wraps.”
Just days after Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) signed an updated law that finally banished the Pride standard from flying at City Hall, Boise unveiled vinyl wraps featuring the Progress Pride flag colors on the building’s three flagpoles, reaching nearly all the way up to the flags themselves.
The flags on those poles don’t include a Pride flag.
Last Tuesday, following Little’s signature — not so coincidentally, on the Trans Day of Visibility — Boise Mayor Lauren McLean (D) ordered the city’s Pride flag lowered after more than a decade.
After an earlier law first banned all flags that aren’t official government flags, the City Council made the Pride flag an official city flag. Republicans responded with an update to that law, adding language and fines that the city couldn’t circumvent.
On the day Gov. Little signed the new bill, Mayor McLean stood with council members and about 60 supporters at a special City Council meeting, where they proclaimed March 31 as Transgender Day of Visibility in the state capital.
“Many people in this state and around this country are seeking to divide us. They’re seeking to divide us by targeting the most vulnerable among us,” McLean said as she choked back tears, according to the Idaho Statesman. “I want the people in this room to know that I see you. We see you. You are wanted, important, and unique members of our community.”
That night, McLean lit City Hall in the colors of the transgender flag: pink, white, and baby blue.
Now Boise has added the wraps, and a massive sign hung in the building’s glass facade that declares, “Creating a city for everyone,” alongside a Progress Pride rainbow.
“Well, the law pertained to flags, and we are in full compliance with the law,” Mayor McLean told Boise State Public Radio on Tuesday.
“We have a rich history of an arts and culture scene here,” she added. “So because it’s allowed, we have installed art that demonstrates our values of being a safe and welcoming city for everyone.”
State Rep. Ted Hill (R), who brought the two bills to address Republicans’ displeasure with the Pride flag, told the Statesman he was expecting some kind of response, though he’d guessed it would be a mural.
It was too early to tell whether lawmakers would bring a bill to address the mayor’s workaround, Hill said.
“She’s insulting everyone else,” he complained. “Is that City Hall or some activist Pride Hall?”
The Idaho House passed legislation that could make it a felony for transgender people to step foot in a bathroom matching their gender identity.
The legislation takes aim directly at trans individuals using the restroom or locker rooms, threatening those who “knowingly” and “willfully” enter facilities designated for the “opposite biological sex” with prison time. A first offense would count as a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. Those caught using the bathroom in repeated offenses, however, could be convicted as felons and face up to five years in prison.
Idaho Rep. Cornel Rasor, the bill’s Republican sponsor, used transphobic rhetoric as he claimed the change in law was necessary to prevent individuals from criminal actions. “It prevents discomfort and voyeurism escalation and assaults, while preserving single-user options and narrow exceptions so no one is denied access for emergency aid,” Rasor said, according to theIdaho Capital Sun.
But Democratic Idaho Rep. Chris Mathias predicted the opposite would occur. “Forcing people who don’t look like the sex that they were born with, or transgender folks, forcing them to use other people’s bathrooms is going to put a lot of people in danger,” he said.
Ahead of the vote, a transgender Idaho resident, Nikson Matthews, urged lawmakers to consider the real-world consequences of the proposal, walking them through what enforcement could look like in practice. Matthews described a scenario in which someone sees him, a bearded man, enter a men’s restroom, recognizes or suspects he is transgender, and calls the police. Officers, he said, would arrive to find “a bearded man using the men’s bathroom,” yet investigate him solely because of his identity. Under the bill, Matthews warned, he could face up to a year in jail for “peeing, washing my hands, or even being in the bathroom to grab a tissue.”
He said the alternative, forcing him to use women’s facilities, could be even more dangerous, describing how his appearance could provoke confrontation or violence from others who perceive him as a man entering a women’s space. “Every single day when I’m out in public, I have to decide,” Matthews told lawmakers. “Do I feel like going to jail today, or do I feel like being attacked?”
Ultimately, every Democrat in the Idaho House voted against the bill, but the party represents just nine of the chamber’s 70 members. Six Republicans joined with Democrats in voting no, but the bill passed by a 54-15 margin. It now heads to the Idaho Senate, where Republicans hold 29 of 35 seats.
Idaho lawmakers last year voted to restrict transgender people’s access to state-run facilities, including universities, prisons, and domestic violence shelters. The new bill criminalizes bathroom use in both publicly owned government buildings and private businesses that provide public accommodations.
Critics of the legislation cast it as a misguided attack on broader LGBTQ+ rights.
“Idaho politicians have positioned themselves as leaders in this calculated strategy to chip away at the rights of trans people. Each year, a more restrictive anti-trans bathroom law is passed that expands on the previous one,” the state’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union said.
The Idaho House of Representatives passed a measure this week asking the Supreme Court to overturn its landmark 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage across the U.S. But the legislation lost three Republican votes compared to a similar measure that passed in the state House last year.
As the Idaho Statesmanreports, House Joint Memorial 17 passed in a 44–26 vote Tuesday. The measure, introduced by State Rep. Tony Wisniewski (R), is a formal legislative request for the Supreme Court to overturn its 2015 decision in Overgefell v. Hodges. The measure argues that the decision establishing the constitutional right of same-sex couple to legally marry is “at odds with the Constitution of the United States and the principles upon which the United States is established.” In its Obergefell ruling, the measure argues, the Court applied a definition of liberty that would not have been recognized by the country’s founders. The decision, it says, “relies on the dangerous fiction of treating the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution as a font of substantive rights” which “strays from the full meaning of the Constitution.”
House Joint Memorial 17 is identical to House Joint Memorial 1, which the Idaho House passed last year.
This time around, however, 17 Republican lawmakers joined House Democrats to vote against the measure, with three more Republican no votes than in 2025.
According to the Statesman, Republican Reps. Dori Healey and Mike Pohanka, who both voted for House Joint Memorial 1 last year, both voted against the 2026 measure. Grayson Stone, who is serving as a long-term substitute for Rep. Don Hall (R) and recently announced that he is running for Hall’s seat, also voted against the measure. Late last year, Hall replaced former Republican Rep. Lance Clow, who voted for House Joint Memorial 1. Hall resigned due to health issues earlier this year.
Stone reportedly acknowledged that his no vote might amount to “political suicide,” but cited the Bible as the reason for his vote.
“This entire argument is rooted in the Bible,” Stone said, according to the Statesman, noting that the Bible includes instructions on how to shave. “I just don’t understand why we have to apply the Bible to specific aspects of our life, but not all of it. So, I will be voting against this bill.”
Pohanka, meanwhile, noted that his own religious beliefs on same-sex marriage have not changed since he voted for the 2025 measure. However, he told the Statesman that he represents all his constituents and wants to get back to actually legislating.
“I thought we advanced [House Joint Memorial 1] last year,” he said. “This year, to me, it’s just going to cause hurt and pain and I don’t want to do that.”
Healey declined to comment on his vote, according to the Statesman.
House Joint Memorial 17 now advances to the Idaho Senate, which declined to vote on the 2025 measure. Even if the state senate approves House Joint Memorial 17, it would not compel the Supreme Court to act.
Under a new bill introduced Wednesday, the Idaho Legislature would ban local policies in more than a dozen cities that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
The bill, written by the Idaho Family Policy Center, a conservative Christian group, and sponsored by Nampa Republican state Rep. Bruce Skaug, would block local governments in Idaho from having more strict antidiscrimination policies than established in state law.
Skaug argued that the varying local rules hinder economic growth.
“In addition to threatening our religious freedoms, all of these conflicting local antidiscrimination ordinances create a tangled web of red tape that varies from city to city, county to county,” Skaug told lawmakers. “In the business sector, it burdens the entrepreneurs and the employers.”
Since 2011, 13 Idaho cities and towns have passed nondiscrimination ordinances including Sandpoint, Boise, Idaho Falls, Moscow, Lewiston, Meridian, Ketchum, Hailey, Bellevue, Driggs, Victor, Pocatello and Coeur d’Alene. In 2020, Ada County, home to Boise, passed its own, KTVB reported.
Chelsea Gaona-Lincoln, executive director of Add the Words Idaho, a group that has pushed for LGBTQ+ antidiscrimination protections, called the bill embarrassing.
“There are real issues Idaho needs addressed,” she said in a statement. “Lawmakers should move on and find something meaningful and responsible to do with the time and taxpayers’ money. Let queer and trans people live in peace.”
Idaho Family Policy Center, which wrote the bill, echoed Skaug’s arguments
The Idaho House Local Government Committee voted to introduce Skaug’s bill Wednesday, teeing it up for a full committee hearing with public testimony. All 14 Republicans on the committee supported introducing it, and the committee’s two Democrats opposed it.
Rep. Steve Berch, a Boise Democrat, called the bill “an overreach of legislative power or state power over the cities and communities.”
Skaug told the committee that the bill would ban more than just local antidiscrimination policies for LGBTQ+ protections, saying it would also prevent housing-related measures that deal with income and familial status. In an interview after the committee hearing, Skaug couldn’t immediately share which localities have those other nondiscrimination measures.
In preparing the bill, Skaug told the Idaho Capital Sun that he worked with the Idaho Family Policy Center and the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group.
In a statement, Idaho Family Policy Center President Blaine Conzatti said local antidiscrimination ordinances “are frequently weaponized against small business owners — especially wedding vendors or those offering creative design services.”
“No small business owner should ever be forced to choose between violating their sincerely held religious beliefs or leaving the marketplace altogether,” he said. “… Government officials have forced bakers, photographers, florists, graphic designers, and wedding venue operators to participate in same-sex wedding ceremonies and pride festivals.”
Planned Parenthood critiques bill as stripping local control
Rep. Marco Erickson, an Idaho Falls Republican, made the motion to introduce the bill in committee.
In 2013, the Idaho Falls City Council first passed an ordinance barring LGBTQ+ discrimination in housing and employment, becoming the seventh Idaho town with such protections at the time, Boise State Public Radio reported. In 2020, the Idaho Falls City Council expanded the discrimination protections to public accommodations, the Post Register reported.
In a statement, Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates’ Idaho State Director Mistie DelliCarpini-Tolman critiqued the bill as stripping local control.
“In places across Idaho, locally elected officials are ready and willing to stop discrimination, and this bill blocks them from doing exactly that, what voters elected them to do,” Tolman said. “That isn’t small government. It’s a uniform denial of basic protections that tells LGBTQ+ Idahoans and other marginalized residents that their safety and dignity don’t matter.”
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