In 1993, Jack Phillips opened Masterpiece Cakeshop just outside Denver, Colorado. According to an article in The American Conservative, Phillips and his wife decided from the beginning how they would run their business:
Nothing “cruel or unkind or belittling,” nothing that “mocked or contradicted my faith,” no promotion of Halloween. He wouldn’t use alcohol in his baking, and at one point he declined to bake weed-shaped cookies for a marijuana shop. Phillips would serve anyone, but he wouldn’t say just anything. God, he writes, was the master of Masterpiece Cakeshop.
In 2012, two homosexual men requested that Phillips make a cake to celebrate their impending wedding. His refusal put a target on his back. Not only did he begin receiving vile threats, but the Colorado Civil Rights Commission (similar to the Idaho Human Rights Commission) took him to court.
Colorado courts ruled against Phillips, claiming that freedom of religion was not a defense against compelled speech. Alliance Defending Freedom appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 7-2 in his favor in 2018. The very day the opinion was announced, a transgender-identifying individual demanded that he make a cake celebrating a sex change. When Phillips refused, the individual filed a complaint.
The Denver metropolitan area is home to more than three million people—more than the entire state of Idaho—so the gay couple or transgender individual could surely have found another cake shop happy to create whatever design they wanted.
But it was never about cakes. It was never about tolerance and inclusion, but about dominance. The existence of a baker who did not support the LGBTQ+ agenda was an affront to its partisans, and they demanded he submit or be destroyed.
Is that what we want in Idaho? As I explained last week, Idaho law protects people from discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, and disability, as well as age in employment. Democrats have been trying for years to “add the words” sexual orientation and gender identity to the statute, to no avail. (They often refer to those categories with the acronym “SOGI.”)
However, several Idaho cities have passed local ordinances addressing alleged discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. These cities include Boise, Ketchum, Moscow, Coeur d’Alene, Pocatello, Lewiston, Meridian, Hailey, Bellevue, Idaho Falls, Driggs, and Victor.
Sandpoint amended its so-called nondiscrimination ordinance last November following community backlash over a man using the women’s locker room at a local YMCA. That incident, as well as the city of Coeur d’Alene attempting to force a local establishment called the Hitching Post to perform gay weddings or face fines of $1,000 a day, proves that this issue is not merely academic. What happened to Jack Phillips could easily happen to any business owner in one of Idaho’s largest cities.
On Monday afternoon, Rep. Bruce Skaug will present House Bill 557, which would standardize nondiscrimination ordinances throughout Idaho. The bill would prohibit cities from imposing local nondiscrimination ordinances beyond state law, declaring that such matters are the purview of the state alone.
The far left in Idaho is up in arms about this bill. On Sunday afternoon, a group of activists held an online planning meeting to prepare their strategy for testifying against the bill. It was sponsored by LegalVoice, Idaho Queer Caucus, Planned Parenthood, and the ACLU of Idaho.
Legal Voice, one of the main organizers, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Seattle that uses legislative and legal action to protect those it says are facing “gender discrimination” and to keep communities free of “oppression and racism”—the full cultural Marxist laundry list, basically.
Participants in Sunday’s call included Nikson Mathews, a transgender-identifying individual who is a candidate for the House in Boise, as well as Mistie DelliCarpini-Tolman, lobbyist for Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates; Legal Voice’s Bill Mitchell; and others in the LGBTQ+ space.
The presentation covered how to sign up to testify, what to say, and how to handle questions from committee members. Participating activists shared their names, pronouns, and a “word”:
Some participants were concerned that the chair, Rep. Barbara Ehardt, would give supporters of the bill more leeway than opponents:
Organizers urged everyone to send written testimony to ensure a long paper trail for the inevitable lawsuit once this bill becomes law:
Activists were urged to contact the Democrats on the committee, Reps. Monica Church and Steve Berch, as well as Republicans they consider movable on this issue: Reps. Rick Cheatum, Jon Weber, Josh Wheeler, and Marco Erickson:
Mistie DelliCarpini-Tolman asked participants to download an activist packet, so I took it upon myself to grab a copy. The main document is a legislative preview PDF from Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates (PPAA), which I’ll cover more in a later article. The packet includes information on how to testify, such as this graphic:
If you watch the hearing tomorrow, see how many testimonies in opposition follow this pattern.
The packet also includes extensive talking points for people testifying on a variety of issues:
Here are the talking points for H557:
Do you get the picture now, that the culture war is real, and it’s not just a conservative red herring? Over the course of a half century or more, leftist activists have pushed our culture away from its Christian foundations and toward a dystopian nightmare—where your children are taken from you and indoctrinated by force, even mutilated in the name of transgenderism, where nobody is able to escape the requirement to submit, not a baker in Colorado, nor a wedding chapel in Coeur d’Alene. The activists who will be testifying today are going to argue for local control, but their own strategy belies that statement. A Seattle-based advocacy group is coordinating with the Idaho chapters of national organizations to push this and dozens of other issues onto the people of Idaho.
But the good news is that this ideology is on the decline. The American people rejected the doctrine of pronouns, land acknowledgments, and sheer hatred of all that is good and beautiful at the ballot box. Idahoans have always rejected it, yet it’s been forced on us by hook or by crook. But you can stand up for the traditional values that made Idaho and America great in the first place. Contact members of the House Local Government Committee and respectfully ask them to support this bill.
Remember: if you’re not talking to your elected lawmakers, then someone else is. Don’t let a few loud activists make the committee believe they represent a majority of Idahoans, because they don’t.
If the bill passes this committee, it will go to the House floor—that’s when you should contact your two representatives. Then it will likely head to the Senate Local Government & Taxation Committee to start the process again.
Take heart! Idaho is not California, Washington, or New York City. We drew firm lines in the sand and said we will not allow unborn babies to be slaughtered in our state, we will not allow children to be mutilated in the name of transgenderism, and we will not allow boys to play on girls’ sports teams. Today, we hold that line again.
Feature image created with Grok.
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About Brian Almon
Brian Almon is the Editor of the Gem State Chronicle. He also serves as Chairman of the District 14 Republican Party and is a trustee of the Eagle Public Library Board. He lives with his wife and five children in Eagle.
