Idaho’s Divider-General Labrador makes it clear all aren’t welcome | Opinion

It seems like such a simple concept, a statement declaring, “Everyone Is Welcome Here.”

On the banner, now a subject of considerable acrimony brewing on the right, the arms and hands holding the welcome banner are different colors, signifying the diversity and inclusion that have been staples of Idaho life — at least until Trump’s war on DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion).

Let’s not forget that Boise, like the rest of the West, was settled by people from someplace else. Boise’s history is replete with people from different lands arriving in town and being accepted as our newest residents. The Boise school district English Language Learner program serves students speaking 84 different languages — students of the same colors as the hands on the “Everyone is Welcome Here” sign.

The welcome message must take on special meaning for today’s students whose parents come from other places, like the African farmers who sell their wares at the Boise market on Saturdays. Perhaps they arrived in Boise as refugees or maybe they are just immigrants who found their way to America to seek opportunity and a better life for their children. For students of color, different native languages or religious beliefs than the white majority, it must be reassuring to see such a sign in a classroom of white students who seem so far removed from the life experiences of the newcomers.

“Everyone Is Welcome Here” sounds like the kind of message The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints shouts from its steeples as it welcomes the faithful of the same colors as those on the banner. We all know someone from the church who has gone on a mission to a foreign land to spread the good word of the church on families and communities very different than ours.

One place we’ve learned where “Everyone is Welcome Here” is the classroom of Sarah Inama, a sixth-grade history teacher who worked at at Lewis and Clark Middle School in the West Ada school district in Meridian when the controversy broke out. She hung the welcome banner in her classroom. The district superintendent told her to remove it because it violated a recent state law that prohibits the display of banners or flags which represent “political, religious, or ideological views, including but not limited to political parties, race, gender, sexual orientation, or political ideologies.”

No need to explain how paranoid Republicans in the state Legislature would write such a law or a compliant governor would sign it.

Inama refused to remove the banner and eventually resigned. The Boise School District hired her, and she now teaches at East Junior High.

That is hardly the end of the story, not with Attorney General Raúl Labrador lurking in the halls of the state capitol, plotting how to pounce on the slightest deviation from laws passed by Idaho’s busybody Republican legislative majority.

Recently, he used a guest opinion piece in the Idaho Statesman to declare the welcome sign to be against Idaho law, driving yet another wedge between Idahoans who hardly need any more erosion of the common ground we share. But anytime there is an opportunity to widen the chasm between his morally self-righteous extremists and the rest of Idaho, he’s on it.

Labrador blames “government educators with political agendas” on this simple sign, but those who use it here in Boise couldn’t care who came up with the slogan. Regardless of its origins, what could possibly be so dastardly about a teacher reassuring her students she is there for all of them? Only a right-wing rabble-rouser could find a left-wing plot in a welcome banner like that.

The other day as I walked my dog in Hyde Park, I passed one of the signs in front of a home on 13th Street. What does that make the owner of that home, other than someone proud to display a sign that welcomes everyone, no matter their skin color?

A simple way of greeting neighbors and letting others know that Boise is a welcoming community — a message sorely needed now as we read about ICE agents at Trump’s command rounding up Latinos off the streets and at their workplaces to imprison them in detention centers on their way out of the country they call home. Labrador could have passed on the temptation to throw gasoline on the fire and simply refused to offer an opinion or he could have interpreted the words as they were intended by an Idaho teacher.

If Idaho ever needed a leader unafraid of Trump’s single-minded hatred and fear of people of different colors, that time is now. Labrador has labeled a simple greeting of welcome as an “ideological/social movement.” Idaho Education News traced the issue back to mothers in Maple Grove, Minnesota who gathered to decry racist graffiti, so they decided to create an All Are Welcome Here sign. What have we become as neighbors and citizens of Idaho that one of our statewide officers has drawn this line in the sand on a message as simple as the biblical verse: “Love thy neighbor as thyself?”

There have been recurring themes of xenophobia stirring among Americans throughout our immigrant history, but now Labrador stamps his imprimatur on legislation that outlaws a sign as Christian as the Bibles that white Christian nationalists thump in justification of laws that discriminate and exclude.

Let’s get real here. The Party of Lincoln here in Idaho that uses its authority to cast a partisan and conspiratorial spin to such a decent statement of kindness and generosity of spirit has abandoned Lincoln’s most important lesson to his fellow Americans. He summoned Americans to be touched by the better angels of our nature. Instead, Divider-General Labrador preys on his fellow citizens to score points with Idaho’s right wing and dig deeper fissures in the body politic of Idaho.