LAW: Animal Farm revisited
I want to thank Suzanne Metzger for her letter to the editor published May 6. Her criticism of the My Turn letter written by me and published by The Press on Saturday, May 2 was accurate.
The point I was trying to make then and clearly failed to make when I referred to the Country Club lawsuit was to demonstrate that certain types of lawsuits — I call them cultural lawsuits — can easily be big and very, very expensive. Certainly it was never my intent to denigrate women or to comment generally about the merits of that lawsuit.
However, I do want to emphasize that all lawsuits brought under Idaho Code 73-40l are going to be “cultural” lawsuits and each has the potential of being similar to the country club lawsuit in its expense to the losing party.
I want to try again to state the issue as plainly as I can. Every small town and city, every county, and every school district in Idaho is a target for cultural litigation by deeply pious members of an ISIS group or any other religious group no matter how deviant and opposed to Western civilization’s and Idaho’s cultural values and norms their beliefs are. The targets were put there by our Legislature.
Example: Let’s take a small Idaho town chosen at random. Let’s call this town Athol. A well financed Sharia law advocate comes to town and wants to erect a school for young boys that teaches that Sharia law is supreme above all other laws and whose school motto is that “America is the Great Satan.” The site for the new school is on land not zoned for a school as it is a residential area. The city council unanimously denies the building permit as it should and as all residents of the city expect it to.
The Sharia advocate sues Athol and its city council under Idaho Code 73-401. He is in Idaho in the first place because of the invitation given to him by virtue of the language contained in that law. He can hardly believe his good luck. Whatever the outcome of the lawsuit, the Idaho Legislature has done everything in its power to make sure that the plaintiff wins and that the city has to allow the construction of the school. And as if this wasn’t enough, as a further insult to the city our Legislature insists that Athol has to pay the plaintiff’s attorneys fees and costs of suit in the event the city loses.
To my knowledge, nowhere in English common law, nowhere in the huge body of American jurisprudence and certainly nowhere in the history of Idaho law has such a strange, foreign and harmful result been planned by any legislative body. Piety, not Christian Piety, but piety of any religion, no matter how harmful that religion is to us and our way of life, is the cultural value that is central to this law.
This law was initially hard for me to understand because of its absolute strangeness. When something is hard for me to understand I try to deal with the issue metaphorically. For me metaphors often bring clarity. In this matter metaphors abound. In George Orwell’s book “Animal Farm” you may recall the farm animals ran the farm. The pigs quickly took control and soon all power and all benefits of that power flowed exclusively to the pigs. The other farm animals after a time questioned the pigs about these benefits of government going exclusively to the pigs. The pigs act surprised and assert blandly that all farm animals are created equal but some farm animals are more equal than others.
Our Legislature has established a two-tiered level of citizenship. The first group, the group with far more power and prestige, is the pious among us. The second tier is the not-so-pious. We cannot permit the “Animal Farm” law to stand.
NORM GISSEL
Coeur d’Alene