Alliance Wants Anti-Gay Initiative Attorney General Says Initiative Would Allow Discrimination

The Idaho Citizens Alliance’s anti-gay initiative will raise “substantial” questions about restriction of free speech, Attorney General Alan Lance said Friday.

“The public funding and public library provisions are particularly vulnerable to a constitutional challenge,” Lance said.

He also suggested that initiative sponsors should delay the measure until the U.S. Supreme Court rules in a Colorado case.

Lance said the initiative as drafted would allow discrimination based on homosexual behavior. Whether that’s constitutional is the key question in the Colorado case, he said.

Idaho Citizen Alliance chairman Kelly Walton said he disagreed that the Idaho initiative should wait until the Supreme Court rules and said the free speech concerns raised by the advisory are easily fixed to produce a “clean” measure.

But Walton said he considers Lance’s analysis a victory and far better than the review by former Attorney General Larry EchoHawk on a similar anti-gay initiative defeated by voters last November.

“The big difference here is that in the last election cycle, they were basically telling us to throw it in the trash can,” Walton said. “This time, we are very close to getting a constitutional stamp of approval if we tighten it up a little bit.”

Walton said the ICA will study the advisory during the weekend and decide next week if changes are needed.

Brian Bergquist of the No On 1 Coalition, which opposed the 1994 initiative, saw it differently.

“This confirms what we’ve suspected, that the ICA’s new anti-gay initiative is truly the ‘Son of One.’

“It’s unconstitutional, justly like Proposition 1 was,” he said.

“Should this initiative be put on the ballot and approved by voters, we would certainly challenge it in court and are confident it would be declared unconstitutional,” said Jack Van Valkenburgh, executive director of American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho.

“Properly, the attorney general identified serious constitutional problems in the Idaho initiative that do not exist in the Colorado anti-gay amendment,” he said.

Lance’s office issued its review on the proposed “Family and Child Protection Act,” the slightly revised rerun of Proposition One defeated by the voters last November.

The alliance hopes to gather more than 41,000 signatures of registered voters in the next year to put the initiative before voters in the November general election.

The measure seeks to deny “minority status” protection to homosexuals. It also would forbid public funds from being used to condone, advocate or promote homosexual behavior.

Other sections forbid schools from spending public funds to condone or promote homosexuality.