EDITORIAL: City deals a fair blow to hatred
Speech is still free in Coeur d’Alene.
Just pull up a chair at your favorite watering hole, listen to passionate political partisans at the park, or check out what’s being said anywhere people believe they’re not being overheard.
You’ll hear free speech loud and sometimes cringingly clear.
But what is not free, thanks to the City Council’s unanimous adoption of a municipal hate crime law, is “the commission of certain, already established crimes, but motivated by a person’s actual or perceived race, color, creed, religion, ancestry, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, physical or mental disability, or national origin.”
Put more simply, harass somebody for any of the above reasons — infringe on the very rights you demand for yourself — and now you might actually pay.
In addressing the City Council, Tony Stewart, our region’s civil rights leader, put it perfectly:
“We are appalled at the suggestion that constitutionally protected hate speech can cross that line to say one can vocally berate, bully, intimidate, harass and demand the victims leave our beautiful city and not return,” said Stewart, representing the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations Board of Directors.
The problem is that our beautiful city has sprung some very ugly leaks.
With an actual municipal law now on the books, the ugliness isn’t likely to go away — that’s going to take a lot more work by a lot more people — but at least it can be discouraged by fines, community service and even jail time.
The accused will still have to be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in court, which is likely to be no simple task. And that’s as it should be.
City officials also noted that this isn’t some knee-jerk bureaucratic overreaction to a spate of reprehensible acts in the past year or so. The new municipal law mirrors that of many other cities across the nation, communities that felt compelled to fill the gap left by state and federal laws that perhaps unwittingly allowed room for the infringement on some citizens’ most basic rights.
While Coeur d’Alene is Kootenai County’s largest city, it is not the only one with an intense desire to treat all residents and visitors respectfully. That’s why adoption of a similar law in Post Falls, Hayden, Rathdrum, Dalton Gardens, Spirit Lake, Athol and elsewhere would be a positive step for the broader community.
As City Councilman Dan Gookin aptly noted, racists can still be racists. They simply won’t be able to maliciously harass others with the expectation of impunity.