Idaho achieved good things this legislative session. But new tone is frightening | Opinion

The 2023 legislative session is over.

A few very good and very significant things were accomplished. But in all, 2023 was a very frightening session, when efforts by Republicans to attack basic rights were incessant.

These days, when the Legislature convenes, the question is always: What group are lawmakers going to attack? Whose rights are they going to try to strip away?

The “live and let live” spirit of the West seems dead. More and more, the tide has turned against real freedom. Far-right lawmakers are actively attacking it every year, seeking to use prisons, civil court judgments and other powers of the government to remold the culture, to force people to live according to their version of Christian doctrine.

The worst instance of that this year was House Bill 71, which will take effect in January, although legal challenges are inevitable. The bill makes all gender-affirming care for transgender children a felony.

Our editorial board recommended that the Legislature ban only surgeries on minors, which do not occur in Idaho anyway. That would leave open less invasive, more reversible treatments, such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy — which a large body of empirical evidence, and major medical associations, indicate can significantly reduce depression and the risk of suicide in kids with gender dysphoria.

Doctors who follow the standard of care for transgender minors would face sentences similar to someone who attacks a stranger on the street with a knife. It’s unthinkable.

And families of transgender Idahoans who are already relying on this care face a terrible choice: Withdraw care from their children, break the law or flee the state.

So we’re chasing them out of our community. It’s incredibly cruel.

Idaho also issued the nation’s first restrictions on interstate travel for abortions, yet another bill that’s almost certain to be found unconstitutional.

Idaho Legislature achievements

Education was a bright spot.

House Bill 24, the Idaho Launch grant program, will be a game changer. Gov. Brad Little’s signature bill of the session will allow Idaho high school graduates to get grants of $8,500 — enough to fund an associate’s degree or technical certification at most of Idaho’s community colleges, or to get a head start on a four-year degree with no debt.

It’s a program supported by strong evidence from controlled trial studies, which show that kids tend to work harder and be more diligent with those possibilities open to them. It will pay Idaho untold dividends decades from now.

And there was another year of good investments in Idaho’s public education system. Starting teacher pay will soon rise to $47,477, higher than that of any of our neighbors except Washington and in the top 10 nationally. Overall, the public schools budget rose by about $380 million, a very healthy increase.

Little vetoed House Bill 314, the library censorship bill, and the House didn’t have the votes to override him.

This bill would have imposed a regime of censorship in libraries. It would have allowed parents to collect bounties by sending kids to get books that could violate highly unclear legal standards, which means that libraries would have no ability to predict what could bankrupt them. Many would have self-censored to be safe, making available only the narrowest, clearly safe selection of material.

Several bills aimed at banning drag shows in public — which again used strategic ambiguity to endanger large swaths of the performing arts generally — failed to gain momentum in the Senate and died. But several versions passed in the House.

Many of these bad ideas did not succeed, but they were near-misses. And they’re going to come back next year. It’s going to take a lot of courage, and serious organization, to stop them.

Idaho needs to revive the live-and-let-live spirit of the West — the spirit of freedom — and stop its march in the direction of fascism and religious authoritarianism.

This story was originally published April 10, 2023 at 4:00 AM.