Idaho Legislature finally wants to Add the Words — but for those who are unvaccinated

There have been two groups in recent decades who have presented their case for restrictions on employers to preserve workers’ rights at the Idaho Legislature.

The first is Idaho’s LGBT community, which has fought for Add the Words legislation that would protect sexual orientation and gender identity as existing employment law protects race, sex, religion and national origin.

The second is opponents of the COVID-19 vaccine, who have sought legislation to either out-and-out ban all employer vaccine mandates, or make vaccination status a protected class like race, or various other measures. That effort has been rewarded by the longest legislative session in Idaho history, and well over 30 bills and numerous hearings.

House Bill 412, a bill essentially identical to Add the Words, but for those who decline vaccines rather than those who are born LGBT, passed the House 47-22 on Tuesday.

The LGBT community has been given basically nothing, apart from a single legislative hearing, even after almost two decades of steady activism.

Is there a legislative or philosophical principle that can explain the different treatment of these two groups?

Classically, conservatives stood for freedom of contract, the principle that a business and an employee should be free to come to agreed terms on their own, without government interference. Clearly, that is not a principle to which most Republican lawmakers hold, or they would not currently be considering antidiscrimination legislation.

Is there a fundamental difference between the group they have refused protection and the one they are going out of their way to protect?

Of course, there are concrete distinctions between being LGBT and refusing a vaccination: One is an inborn characteristic; the other is a decision. Being LGBT does not place anyone else at risk; refusing vaccination encourages the spread of a deadly disease.

So, to the degree the groups are different, it is clear that the LGBT community has a stronger claim to employment protections than those who refuse vaccination.

Here is the lesson that can be learned from the different treatment of these two groups:

The Republican supermajority in the Idaho Legislature does not have an overall insistence on a principle of freedom of contract on which nondiscrimination laws infringe.

It does not base its decisions on which groups to extend legal protection on the unchosen or immutable nature of characteristics or a history of discriminatory practices.

Rather, it seems the Legislature’s majority makes decisions about discrimination law based on whether or not they have cultural sympathy with the group of people in question. They do not have sympathy with LGBT Idahoans, so decades of activism brings them nothing. They identify with with — and many themselves are — vaccine opponents, so they will take the unprecedented step of reconvening the Legislature in November to ensure they can extend special legal protections to them.

This reconvened session is not an exercise of conservative principles but of conservative identity politics.

And because conservative identity politics define lawmaking in Idaho, a child born gay today is born with no protection against being fired or evicted. But a man who thinks the vaccine is a plot by Bill Gates to depopulate the world and so takes no responsibility to protect those around him from infection, likely will soon have protection against being fired or evicted.

And the difference is simply that the majority has little sympathy for the first person and considers the second one of their own.

If this is not tyranny of the majority, what is that term supposed to mean?