Taking Hatred By The Horns Retiring Human Rights Chief Says Idaho Has Made Great Strides Against Racism

Idaho has made great strides in promoting human rights in the past two decades, and doesn’t deserve to be known as a haven for racists, says the retiring director of the Idaho Human Rights Commission.

Many people across the nation simply know little about Idaho, said Marilyn Shuler - most don’t even know which time zone Idaho is in.

“When you have a situation where people know nothing about a state and the only news they have might be that we produce world-class potatoes and that we have the Aryan Nations here, those are the two things that they’re going to remember about us,” she said Friday.

Shuler, who will retire in March after 20 years at the agency’s helm, said those bits of information stick in people’s minds. “They believe falsely that we’re somehow a haven for hate. We do have the Aryan Nations here, they have been an embarrassment to the state for many years. But many other places also have groups and organizations that espouse hate.”

Idaho has some of the nation’s strongest laws against hate crimes, she said.

“If persons cross the line, I think law enforcement is able and willing to prosecute.”

When Shuler took over at the Human Rights Commission in 1978, the agency had had a new director nearly every year since its inception in 1969. Shuler’s tenure brought a stability to the agency that’s expected to continue. Her replacement will be Leslie Goddard, the deputy attorney general who has provided legal advice to the agency for the past 20 years.

Gov. Phil Batt praised Shuler this week for her leadership.

“We are a tolerant people in Idaho,” he said. “We are concerned about human rights, and I think that story needs to be told. No one has told that story better than Marilyn Shuler.”

Shuler, 58, recalled how community resistance to racist groups in North Idaho led to the formation of a human rights coalition. “Now we have a six-state group.”

In addition, local human rights groups have formed throughout the state.

Reports of malicious harassment in Idaho have dropped, Shuler said. “I think the community has said, ‘That’s not OK.”’ In recent years, the Human Rights Commission has dealt increasingly with complaints about job discrimination. The complaints might involve discrimination or harassment based on gender, race or age.

“It’s an area where more and more people know that discrimination is wrong,” said Shuler.

But the discrimination also is becoming more subtle and more difficult to prove, as more people become aware that it’s prohibited.

“It’s much more challenging for us to generate the proof of that.”

Age discrimination complaints have increased as the baby boomer generation has begun to hit its 50s. Those complaints tend to come from people who are white, male, and earning high salaries - a group not accustomed to discrimination.

Idaho’s minority population is growing at twice the rate of its nonminority population, Shuler said, and by the year 2000, the state will be 10 percent ethnic minorities.

“Unfortunately, these people will be poor and they’re young,” she said. Seventy percent of Idaho’s minority residents are Hispanic.

The challenge for Idaho will come as two traditional biases come together: “Bias against the poor, and also the feeling of discomfort we have with a different cultural group.” The best thing people can do to avoid such bias is become acquainted with people who are different from themselves, Shuler said.

“People need to get to know each other to break down the fear.”

Shuler also called the defeat of an anti-gay rights initiative in 1994 “one of Idaho’s finest moments.” The measure, she said, “bred bigotry.” In a rare move, the Human Rights Commission voted to oppose that ballot measure.

Shuler, during a taping Friday of KTVB-TV’s “Viewpoint” public affairs program, noted that the measure was soundly defeated in eastern Idaho, a socially conservative region where many residents are members of the Mormon church. Mormons have been the victims of discrimination themselves, she said, and understand its unfairness.

Shuler predicted that Idaho will extend its hate crime laws to cover malicious harassment of gays and lesbians.

Though the state is conservative, she said, “I think it’s rare to find a person that says you should maliciously harass a person because of a characteristic such as that.”

, DataTimes