It’s been interesting to watch the current administration and its GOP backers contort themselves into logical pretzels to explain to Americans why their policies, which are clearly either steeped or tinged with racist elements, are not in fact racist. Immigration policies and practices that are conducted without such annoyances as due process are waved off as the mere enforcement of the law, ignoring just how selective that enforcement is. Facilities that are plainly echoing the practices of the Third Reich, or at least the practice of Japanese concentration camps, are laughed off as though they were exaggerations when they absolutely are not. Instances of fascism, up to and including the military marching the streets of our cities and deployed against our own people, are described not for what it is, but through Orwellian euphemisms to shrug at what should be a scandal.
It’s bullshit and those engaging in the bullshit know it. But every once in a while one of those bullshitters accidentally give away the game. Let’s go to Idaho and talk about how the Attorney General’s office is handling the enforcement of House Bill 41.
House Bill 41, which goes into effect Tuesday, prohibits flags or banners depicting a political viewpoint from public K-12 schools. The law’s vague language led to questions from educators and school leaders.
The IDE asked the attorney general’s office on March 28 for guidance on the new law. It took the attorney general’s office until May 29 to provide a response. The department then took nearly another month to provide guidance to school districts, which it did Thursday.
That guidance said school employees cannot display flags or banners that show opinions, emotions, beliefs or thoughts about politics, economics, society, faith or religion. The guidance and the attorney general’s opinion did not define these terms.
One instance of the enforcement guidance for this complete mess of a law concerned a teacher, Sarah Inama, in the West Ada School District. Inama hung a banner in her classroom in 2020. Here is exactly what it looked like.
In March, the District instructed Inama to take the banner down, citing the new law. She refused. Then guidance was requested over that specific instance from the Idaho AG office, headed up by Republican Raul Labrador, which provided the following response:
Using West Ada as an example, would the two displays in Ms. Inama’s classroom be prohibited by this law?
Yes. These signs are part of an ideological/social movement which started in Twin Cities, Minnesota the 2016 election of Donald Trump. See e.g. https://www.kare11.com/article/news/the-story-behind-the-all-are-welcome-here-signs/89-49621 4879. Since that time, the signs have been used by the Democratic party as a political statement. The Idaho Democratic Party even sells these signs as part of its fundraising efforts. See https://store.idahodems.org/everyone-is-welcome-24-x-18-coroplast-yard-sign/; https://store.idahodems.org/everyone-is-welcome-4-x-2-7-vinyl-sticker-pack-of-two/ Ms. Inama first displayed her sign in 2017, during the height of the above-referenced social movement. In media interviews, she explained she hung the sign to share her personal, ideological beliefs.
Inama quit the district over the banner issue and has instead been welcomed by the Boise School District.
Let’s start by picking apart all the wrong that is in the AG’s guidance above. First, Inama wasn’t even a teacher in 2017, so they have their dates completely wrong as a matter of fact. And, while it’s true that the Idaho Democratic Party fundraises using those banners, they both didn’t come up with the banners and didn’t start selling them until after the conflict between Inama and the district began in March, years after she hung it up. That seems pretty fucking important, no? Finally, the link cited by the AG’s office to support that the banners are political in nature as a matter of activism states exactly the opposite.
The opinion then links to a news story from a Minnesota news station back in 2017 when a group of women came together against hate after racist graffiti appeared at Maple Grove High School the day after Trump’s 2016 election. Their signs read “All are Welcome Here.” The founders of the movement told the TV station that their movement was about combating hate and was nonpartisan and secular.
These are supposed to be lawyers working for a secular state that should know how to properly research and cite their citations. The response on Inama’s case are wrong on nearly every factual question.
But perhaps what’s most interesting about this guidance is what it actually means if you look at it from a purely logic standpoint. We live, unfortunately, in a two-party political system. If the message that everyone is welcome in our public schools is a political statement, cited as being a Democrat policy by the AG, then the converse must be true. The GOP policy is therefore that everyone is not welcome in our public school system.
Now, we already know this to be true, of course. The book-banning community in America is, after all, almost entirely Republican. I’ll also note that nobody seems to be talking about the removal of the American flag from Idaho schools, nor the Pledge of Allegiance, both codified into Idaho law and both of them far more overt political symbols and practices than a banner about inclusion.
Given the casual application of both the letter and spirit of the anti-banner law, the stance of the AG’s office is plainly clear: every child is not welcome in our public schools. While that stance should obviously be abhorrent, I suppose it’s nice of the bigots to say this out loud.
But I, for one, think it would be better to allow benign signs of welcome and inclusion for children to exist. Because if that sort of thing is in fact political, then all is lost.