When freedom means its opposite: Idaho Freedom Foundation’s pride | Opinion
Pride month has begun. It’s an important time, perhaps more important than ever, to stand beside the LGBTQ+ community, which has come under growing attack as the far right has become politically ascendant in Idaho.
Until recently, the LGBTQ+ community was under a de facto state ban. The Idaho Constitution still contains a despicable, anti-family clause that (unconstitutionally) asserts that gay marriage is not recognized in this state. For well over a decade, lawmakers have refused to provide basic anti-discrimination protections so that someone can’t be fired or evicted solely because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
So, for people with a functioning conscience, Pride is a time to push back against this kind of tyranny. It is part of the greater struggle for freedom and equality.
But for the Idaho Freedom Foundation, now under the leadership of former Republican state Rep. Ron Nate, it seems that Pride is a time to celebrate prominent bigots.
In an email missive this week, Nate declared his group would instead celebrate “Pride in America” week, focused on celebrating “courageous Americans who faced opposition that often threatened their finances, careers, and even their lives.”
So, then, certainly a time to celebrate Harvey Milk. Or Martin Luther King Jr. Or Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass or Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Of course, none of these, nor anyone remotely like them, appears on Nate’s list.
When Pat Buchanan — who the Anti-Defamation League characterized as an “unrepentant bigot” for his long history of antisemitism and racism, who was similarly criticized by prominent conservatives like Charles Krauthammer, and who ended his career writing for the white nationalist-friendly website VDARE — is arguably the least offensive member of your trinity of the immoral, that says something about your values.
President Andrew Jackson, also on the list, spearheaded the most pervasive attempt at ethnic cleansing in American history — the Indian Removal Act, which precipitated the Trail of Tears and other brutal efforts to end the presence of Native Americans east of the Mississippi.
The third name on the list, and perhaps the worst, is one few will recognize: John C. Calhoun.
Calhoun — a U.S. vice president, senator, representative and Cabinet member from South Carolina whose political career ran between the 1810s and 1840s — was not a public intellectual who also owned slaves. He was not, like Thomas Jefferson, a man whose considerable virtues are forever tainted by his wicked acts as a slave owner.
Calhoun was rotten to the core.
Calhoun was one of slavery’s most vociferous defenders and apologists, a man who tried to argue that abolitionists had to be censored and suppressed for the future of the nation as he pushed it toward war. As many historical sources note, at a time when most of slavery’s defenders at least had to resort to the argument that slavery was a necessary evil, Calhoun made the argument that it was a positive good.
“Abolition and the Union cannot coexist,” Calhoun said in 1837. “... But let me not be understood as admitting, even by implication, that the existing relations between the two races in the slaveholding States is an evil:—far otherwise; I hold it to be a good, as it has thus far proved itself to be to both, and will continue to prove so if not disturbed by the fell spirit of abolition.”
By laying the intellectual foundation for the idea that Southern states could secede from the Union in response to federal restraints on slavery, he laid the groundwork for the Civil War, which started about a decade after his death (of tuberculosis, not persecution, while still arguing for the expansion of slavery). The Confederacy placed Calhoun’s likeness on its $100 and $1,000 bills, as the National Park Service notes.
It’s rather obvious that Nate is aware of this history, since he specifically praises Calhoun because he “articulated the doctrine of nullification to defend against tyranny.” Calhoun was indeed a leader in the so-called Nullification Crisis, which nearly became a civil war and is widely understood as a precursor to the Civil War.
During his legislative career, Nate argued that Idaho should employ the same theory to nullify the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which recognized that the Constitution requires marriage equality.
So for Nate’s Freedom Foundation, June is a time to celebrate dedicated, fervent slaveholders whose main contribution to history was to build a framework to justify slavery and to place America on the path toward its deadliest war.
It’s certainly not time to stand by people facing actual state persecution — having the state take away their ability to access health care, their bodily autonomy and other basic rights. This is the policy program Nate and his allies have supported and helped to instantiate, so naturally it must be explained away as something other than the tyranny it is — just as Calhoun argued that abolitionism was a grave threat to freedom.
What a strange and backward understanding of the word “freedom.”
This story was originally published June 5, 2025 at 4:00 AM.