[Vision2020] North Idaho Needs Human Rights Resolve

[Tom Hansen]

>From today's (February 11, 2007) Spokesman Review with a special thanks to
D. F. Oliveria and Representative Tom Trail.

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North Idaho needs human rights resolve 

February 11, 2007

I wasn't surprised that Idaho Rep. Dick Harwood opposed a common-sense
resolution in support of human rights.

For years, the St. Maries Republican has delighted his eastern Benewah
County handlers with his slams against the Coeur d'Alene Indian Tribe and
sometimes other minorities. Harwood made a name for himself in his freshman
term by using the racial terms "Jew 'em down" and "squaw."

Harwood hasn't failed to disappoint since. Of the human-rights resolution
sponsored by Rep. Tom Trail, R-Moscow, Harwood said: "I thought it was a
crummy bill - we already got all that stuff in there. It was just a
feel-good, fuzzy thing."
 
I was somewhat chagrined that state Rep. Phil Hart, R-Athol, joined Harwood
and seven other dissenters as the House voted 59-9 in favor of the
resolution. Hart, a former Constitutionalist who switched to the Republican
Party before his 2004 race, refused to pay his income taxes for seven years
until he lost a quixotic lawsuit in which he contended that the IRS was
misinterpreting the Sixteenth Amendment. Otherwise, he hasn't been an
embarrassment. Until now.

I was startled that perceptive state Rep. Bob Nonini, R-Post Falls, was
counted among the naysayers.

"I just think there's a group of people . that like to keep sore wounds
opened up," Nonini said after the House vote. "Those people (the Aryan
Nations) have gone away - we don't talk about it in North Idaho."

Nonini, of course, is right that the Aryan Nations is gone, sued into
bankruptcy by a courageous mother and her son who were attacked by goons
guarding the Aryans' former compound on the rimrock above Hayden Lake.
Founder Richard Butler is dead. The compound has been razed to such an
extent that it's unrecognizable as the former site where the nation's
who's-who of white supremacism congregated each year. Cows graze where
Butler once fumed.

However, Nonini is wrong to suggest that North Idahoans should forget about
the Aryans and move on.

As a former reporter, who covered the rebirth of the local human rights
movement from 1984 to 1993, I heard one leader after another - from the late
Bill Wassmuth to Norm Gissel and Tony Stewart - state that hate grows in a
vacuum. If it's not confronted, hate spreads, manifesting itself in attacks
against mixed-race couples and children, racist mailings, marches and even
violence. North Idaho experienced all those elements during the heyday of
the hate brigade.

Harwood, Hart and Nonini have embraced the same misguided approach that
nervous Coeur d'Alene business leaders did in the 1980s.

In a back-room showdown between human rights activists and business owners,
the late Larry Broadbent, who was the Kootenai County undersheriff at the
time, was asked what would happen to the Aryans if there weren't a human
rights movement to oppose them. Instead of 60 racists in the county,
Broadbent said, there would be 600. Butler was trying to establish a
whites-only "territorial imperative" in North Idaho. Meanwhile, business
owners contended that human rights activists were helping racists by drawing
attention and publicity to them.

Gissel, a Coeur d'Alene attorney who assisted Morris Dees of the Southern
Poverty Law Center in the civil lawsuit that bankrupted Butler and the
Aryans, admonished the nine legislators who opposed the human rights
resolution: "I can't find a single example in the history of racism where it
benefited anybody to be quiet about it. . You have to have public discourse
about it."

Nonini, to his credit, has fought effectively for property tax relief and to
protect water rights. House Republican leaders recognized his passion and
ability earlier this winter when they appointed the sophomore legislator as
chairman of the Education Committee. But he needs a crash course on human
rights and the importance of elected officials to stand firm against
discrimination, even for the sake of appearance. Trail's resolution, after
all, has little impact, other than to send a message to racists and to
minorities who suspect lily-white Idaho remains fertile ground for
intolerance.

With the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations standing watch, a
21st-century version of the Aryan Nations isn't likely to gain another
toehold. However, racism persists, as is evident by the recent settlement
between Lewiston's Wal-Mart and a black employee who'd been racially
harassed for two years and then fired when he complained. Another indicator
that North Idaho hasn't arrived as a center of enlightenment is the 3,252
votes attracted by "European- American" activist Stan Hess in an
unsuccessful race for a North Idaho College trustee position last November.

All elected officials from North Idaho should seize every chance to promote
human rights and to denounce racism - as other North Idaho delegates did in
supporting Trail's resolution. Anything less encourages ideologues still
seeking a home for their hateful creed.

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Not On The Palouse, Not Ever
Moscow, Idaho

"If not us, who?
If not now, when?"

- Unknown