Wassmuth Center for Human Rights

Will we see you there?

For more than a decade, a Pride flag flew outside Boise City Hall. On March 31, Governor Brad Little signed HB 561, banning this flag from government property. Within minutes, the city lowered its flag. A week later, city workers wrapped the building’s three flagpoles — base to banner – in the colors of the Pride flag. Not flown. Wrapped. In full compliance with the letter of the law and full defiance of its spirit.

Pride is the opposite of shame. And shame depends on invisibility to do its work — every euphemism, every law written to make a community disappear. The people who first claimed the word pride for this fight knew that. On June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. Patrons were supposed to comply quietly, as they always had. This time, they refused. The uprising lasted days. One year later, thousands took to the same streets in the first Pride march. They chose the name because they demanded to be seen.

Fifty-seven years later, the distance between safety and danger remains staggering. The Equaldex Equality Index ranks 197 countries on a scale of 0 to 100, measuring legal protections alongside public attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people. Iceland sits at the top. Marriage equality, adoption rights, and hate crime protections — nearly every safeguard is in place. In a 2024 Gallup survey, 93 percent of Icelanders said their community was a good place for gay and le***an people to live. In 2009, the country elected Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir as prime minister, the world’s first openly gay head of government. Her sexuality was barely a headline. That is what arrival looks like: belonging that requires no announcement. Belonging that welcomes us for who we are.

Somalia, at number 197, is on the other end. Homosexuality is punishable by death. There are no protections of any kind. Equaldex lists no public opinion data; the questions cannot be asked safely. The United States sits at number 33, somewhere in the uneasy middle, where on issue after issue — housing, adoption, gender-affirming care — the entry reads the same way: varies by region. Sometimes law determines opinion. Sometimes culture leads law. But neither moves without someone willing to go first.

Idaho has been here before. In 1994, the Idaho Citizens Alliance placed Proposition 1 on the ballot. The measure would have barred LGBTQ+ people from anti-discrimination protections, restricted library materials, and prohibited schools from affirming that gay and le***an people are normal. It lost by 3,098 votes out of more than 450,000 cast. That margin was razor-thin, but it held. And the energy from that fight did not dissipate. A year later, a coalition of Idahoans came together to build something lasting. In 1996, they founded the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights. The conviction at the Center's core was simple: when exclusion rises, you answer it not just with opposition but with the long work of building a community where everyone belongs.

That work is not finished. HB 561 was written to remove a symbol. But you cannot legislate people out of sight — not in 1994, and not today. This June, the poles on Capitol Boulevard still stand tall, wrapped in every color the law tried to prohibit. They are not decoration. They are a promise that the people in this community will be seen, and safe, and ours to defend.

Speakers at the Center: Wednesday, June 3 from 6:30 - 8:00 PM
 
Idaho, the Environment, and Latinos: New Stories for the Past and Future
 
Dr. Emily Wakild, Cecil D. Andrus Endowed Chair for the Environment and Public Lands, Boise State University
 
Latinos have been shaping Idaho since before it was a state, contributing to the land, to conservation, and to the communities we know today. Yet too often, these stories go untold.
Dr. Emily Wakild is working to change this. A historian of Latin American environmental history, Dr. Wakild explores the deep connections between people, place, and the more-than-human world. She asks what those connections reveal about who we are and who we can become.
Drawing on profiles from ‘Nosotros: Latinas in Idaho’, which she co-edited with María González Cárdenas, Dr. Wakild will weave together environmental and Latino histories in our state. Through testimonials and experiences of influential Latinas, she will help us understand how Idaho’s past grows richer and how the landscapes come alive with personal meaning when we listen to the stories that have always been here.
Join us for an evening that expands our understanding of Idaho’s history and deepens our connection to the land and to one another.
Register here to join us: https://www.wassmuthcenter.org/speakers-at-the-center/
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