No small number of Republican lawmakers have Democratic wives. They
are fabulous and in some cases outspoken and lead the legislative
ladies on adventures to places some of the Republican women otherwise
might never go.
One legislative husband, Skip Smyser, former
law maker himself and lobbyist but not a Democrat has done more for
Human Rights education in the legislature than I will ever do in my
lifetime. He rents out the Egyptian and gets lawmakers together to see
a movie each year. This year it was Amazing Grace a film about ending
the British slave trade. Actually it is very much a movie about the
legislative process as men in powdered wigs battle in a chamber that
makes even Idaho's house of Representatives look sedate and
dispassionate.
Skip's movie nights kill me emotionally. I sit
eating candy and cry as discreetly as I can possibly manage. Other law
makers cry too. Progressive law makers say kind things to me after. My
socially conservative friends instead quote the few lines from the film
that keep them sternly entrenched where they are on the other side of
any Human Rights issues at hand. Talking afterward it is hard to
believe they saw the same movie I did. But they did and I can only hope
that later in dreams more will come back to them, that they will soften
and see something like the shadow of pain in the eyes of others for a
brief moment in time.
Tonight at the Dairymen's dinner, a
colleague quoted to me a line from the movie Amazing Grace. It was
about having to give up your freedoms because someone else is in a
hurry to have government protect someones rights.
I had to grip
my beer glass tight to really hear the assertion that slave owners gave
up their "freedom" to make money off the labor of men and women they
never paid a salary to. How do I fathom someone seeing that as a
"freedom" to be taken from slave owners rather than as a thing they had
stolen from some other human beings… I do not know. I do know that
these are the same lawmakers who see Idaho's human rights act as a law
that robs them of the freedom to fire whom they choose, a restriction
on their business and beliefs that remains intolerable to them so far
to this day.