In the last several years, Idaho has experienced a wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, in line with a nationwide trend of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), there have been 356 extremist and non-extremist incidents in the U.S. against the LGBTQ+ community from June 2022 and April 2023.
An anti-LGBTQ+ hate crime occurred at Boise State on Nov. 12, 2023, one of the many hate crimes that have occured in Boise this year. Matthew Leigh was convicted of hate crimes after going on an anti-LGBTQ+ crime spree in Idaho, pride flags were stolen from Harrison Boulevard, and the Community Center, a LGBTQ+ outreach and support organization, had its windows smashed in.
The Spiral Of Injustice
The Wassmuth Human Rights center created the concept of the Spiral of Injustice, a spiral that shows the levels of escalation of ostracization and dehumanization that lead to the violation of human rights, and in extreme cases, genocide.
The Spiral of Injustice may explain the upward trend of anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes in Idaho. According to The Spiral, the process begins with language, where stereotypes are accepted and promoted, and the group deemed as “other” is openly mocked and belittled.
In recent years, there has been an upward trend in hate speech targeted at the LGBTQ+ community, and Idaho is no exception to this phenomenon. Idaho’s own legislators have publicly condemned the LGBTQ+ community on multiple occasions.
Dorothy Moon called a drag show for children a “perverse idea that children should engage in sexual performances with adult entertainers” causing multiple organizations to withdraw from pride. Nampa Rep. Bruce Skaug called gender dysphoria a mental illness that needs to be treated and claimed HB 71 protected children from “sterilization and mutilation”. A survey of Idaho schools found that 84% of children regularly heard homophobic remarks.
According to Javier Smith, a board member at the Idaho Community Center, this rhetoric sends the message that LGBTQ+ are not the same, and that people who are not part of the LGBTQ+ community are superior to them
“It does create fear. Especially if they haven’t come out yet, they’ll want to stay in the closet more,” Smith said.
The next step of the spiral is avoidance, according to Wasmuth Center, it is the “conscious or unconscious” denial of participation, representation and access of the “other”.
According to a snowball sampling survey of 153 campus members provided by the Gender Equity Center, in Spring 2019 only 11 out of 153 survey respondents said they felt the experiences of LGBTQ+ people at Boise State campus were positive. A survey done of 33 LGBTQ+ campus members at Boise State found that LGBTQ+ students faced challenges such as homophobia and a lack of understanding from straight campus members.
After avoidance, the next ring on the spiral is discrimination. According to Smith, this is most visible in legislation. Idaho has experienced a slew of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the last several years, from HB 71, a bill passed to ban gender affirming care for minors, to a bill introduced by Rep. Julianne Young proposing to make gender and sex synonymous in Idaho code.
Smith states that when people in positions of power are so willing to push oppressive legislation and harmful rhetoric, it emboldens violent action against ‘the other’.
“It gives people permission. People want to think of themselves as good. And so sometimes they’ll find wonderful ways to justify their mistreatment of others… In this case, the law says it’s okay or the people in power think the same way as me. So therefore, my feelings are justified. I’m not a bad person,” Smith said. “So this was the rise of these laws and these people expressing anti-gay sentiments that are supposedly our leaders emboldened them to folks like that, to be more honest or to not confront these feelings and justify them.”
There was a rise in the yearly number of hate crimes in the last five years, reaching the highest in over two decades. There were only two hate crimes targeting sexual orientation in 2018, but over the last five years there has been an upward trend of hate crimes against the LGBTQ+ community. 2021 marked a high in over two decades, with 11 hate crimes targeting the LGBTQ+ community. 2022 was the second highest in the last five years, and the third highest in over two decades with nine hate crimes against the LGBTQ+ community. While the data has not been released for 2023 yet, there have been multiple hate crimes in the last year, a troublesome indicator for the official numbers that will be released later this year.
Legislation
Some, like Shiva Rajbhandari, a trustee for the Boise School District Board, believe that legislatures bear some of the responsibility for the violence against the LGBTQ+ community in Idaho.
“These are the top leaders in our state and they are complicit, if not endorsing violence against LGBTQ+ people with their rhetoric,” Rajbhandari said. “You recognize that, like, these people truly, truly don’t care about the well being of people, and they truly, truly wish that they could just wish these people away. And that sets a tone in our state and that endorses the political extremism and the far right violence that we’ve seen.”
According to Smith, these bills can be a political tactic to scapegoat the LGBTQ+ community.
“It’s a way to consolidate power by simply saying ‘you all hate the same people I do. Well, gosh, that we have something in common,’” Smith said. “And it’s an easy way to get people to join together and blame [them] for everyone’s problems, without really solving anything, and just allowing folks to take power from others based solely on that.”
However, Jenna Damron, an advocacy fellow at the American Civil Liberties of Idaho, says there is no way to tell if legislatures are pushing this type of legislation because they genuinely believe in it or for political reasons.
“We try not to assume or impugn the motivations of legislators, or the intentions of legislators,” Damron said. “I do think that in the last five years, maybe LGBTQ+ rights have become more of a socially talked about issue. I think that does affect what legislators introduced.”
Regardless, all three believe it is the responsibility of the legislators to represent and protect every constituent.
“I’ve been extremely vocal about my support of trans and non-binary young people in our state and I think that’s a responsibility of every elected official, but particularly school leaders. We have a responsibility as leaders of our state to stand up and speak out and do the most to correct the hate that we see,” Rajbhandari said. “Particularly with a legislature that is doing quite the opposite of that, that is amplifying the hate and setting code violence and violence against LGBTQ+ people. I think the pressure is on for local elected officials to do more to really step [up] and not just speak their mind on how much our members of our community matter to Idaho, but also to call out these policy makers and demand justice.”
Barriers To Progress
The reports of hate crimes in Idaho likely fall short of the real number, according to Smith and Damron.
Idaho has no state protections for discrimination or hate crimes on the basis of sexuality, so any hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people in Idaho can only be recognized federally. When the Community Center’s windows were smashed out in homophobic hate crime, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.), have to get involved and find a way to connect the crime to something out of state.
“The F.B.I. wants to know where we’re got our money from because [if] any came from outside sources outside the state, then they can get involved and say this is happening interstate,” Smith said. “Otherwise it was just an Idaho thing, then it would just be considered just vandalism wouldn’t be considered a hate crime.”
The crime was classified as a hate crime, because the Community Center receives some out of state funding, but without it, the crime wouldn’t have been counted in official data. According to Smith and Damron, this creates a gap in reporting of hate crimes in Idaho, meaning that the real numbers might be much higher.
“We have a really poor understanding and a really poor amount of data to show the hate crimes [that] are actually happening here in Idaho. We have national trends on hate crimes and stuff, but we don’t really have a way to track that here because it’s not written into our protections,” Damron said.
In addition to the current laws hindering accurate hate crime reporting, LGBTQ+ often face barriers when advocating for themselves.
According to Damron, the fast pace of Idaho’s legislature and the lack of accessible information give citizens little time or resources to organize and advocate for themselves.
“The process is very inaccessible for most. It’s a very confusing process, even just the legislature idaho.gov website is very confusing to navigate,” Damron said. “We tend to see a bill get introduced and usually within a couple of days you have a public hearing on it. And that’s an extremely fast pace that makes it hard for people to take time off work right. A lot of times, by the time the general public hears about a bill, it’s already moved through those processes quite a bit and it could have even passed one or both parts of the legislature.”
According to Damron, this poses an even bigger burden for people outside the Treasure Valley to come testify or meet with lawmakers.
“‘We kind of have a saying ‘nothing about us without us’. Laws about LGBTQ+ people or focusing on the rights that LGBTQ+ people have in Idaho, shouldn’t be passed without the input of those people,” Damron said. “We don’t currently have LGBTQ+ representation within our lawmakers at all. So that means that there you have a body of people making laws about another body of people… and the importance of getting the community involved is super high. Because without that, they don’t they don’t have a voice within that process as constituents.”
According to Smith, it is important for everyone to get involved as the discrimination will not end with targeting queer and trans people, citing the poem “First They Came” by Pastor Martin Niemöller.
Niemöller’s poem reads “First they came for the Communists / And I did not speak out / Because I was not a Communist / Then they came for the Socialists / And I did not speak out / Because I was not a Socialist / Then they came for the trade unionists / And I did not speak out / Because I was not a trade unionist / Then they came for the Jews / And I did not speak out / Because I was not a Jew / Then they came for me / And there was no one left / To speak out for me.”
