On 'medium level aggravations'
The truth behind lawmakers' obsession with bathrooms and flags
A Republican Idaho political operative explained to me not so long ago that there’s a reason state lawmakers seem fixated on social issues instead of the big problems that can be traced directly to government intervention.
Those big problems include housing unaffordability, a failing education system, ineffective and often useless government programs funded by confiscatory and uneven tax policy, thousands of people on government-funded psychotropic drugs, and more.
The strategy, he said, is to inflict what he called “medium level aggravations” upon political adversaries. The theory goes that the more legislation lawmakers pass that annoys leftists, the more inclined they’d be to move out of the state. Or so he believes.
I think such a strategy is not only doomed to failure — long-term population inflows and outflows from states don’t work that way — but also highly inappropriate. Government should not be used as a tool to target, provoke, or annoy political opponents.
Yet “medium level aggravations” appear to have driven Idaho’s second attempt at a Pride flag ban (complete with daily fines that prompted Boise to remove its flag and wrap its flagpoles in rainbow colors instead), the latest bathroom bill (HB 752, which criminalizes entering a restroom or changing room designated for the opposite sex — even in private businesses), and similar measures advanced in the last two legislative sessions.
One of my primary concerns is that lawmakers — in Idaho and elsewhere — too often tackle matters that existing law and ordinary common sense can already handle.
Government can, of course, set whatever rules it wants for bathrooms in its own buildings. But if the state can do that, why can’t private businesses do the same? Gas stations, restaurants, and grocery stores have long managed bathroom access just as they manage every other aspect of their property — without government direction.
When someone enters a part of a building where they don’t belong — whether a bathroom or a storeroom — it has always been straightforward under existing trespass statutes: tell them to leave. If they return, they are trespassing.
Yet Idaho lawmakers chose to complicate the issue by layering on a new criminal dragnet that now reaches into private property. (See what I did there?!)
The same lack of creative or thoughtful thinking showed up in the second flag bill and its bedazzling consequences in Boise.
What I consider the biggest challenge facing Americans right now is the way government — from city hall to Congress and the White House — has steadily taken away our humanity. It has reduced us to data points, like farm animals to be managed and sorted by algorithm. In the process, we’ve grown more indifferent and even mean to our neighbors, and these constant efforts at control have produced endless conflict.
I do not wish to visit any level of aggravation upon my neighbors through the force of government. Instead, I intend to keep identifying the many ways government gets in our way and undermines our shared humanity — and what we can all do about it.
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