I wasn’t surprised that Idaho Rep. Dick Harwood opposed a common-sense resolution in support of human rights.

For years, the St. Maries Republican has delighted his eastern Benewah County handlers with his slams against the Coeur d’Alene Indian Tribe and sometimes other minorities. Harwood made a name for himself in his freshman term by using the racial terms “Jew ‘em down” and “squaw.”

Harwood hasn’t failed to disappoint since. Of the human-rights resolution sponsored by Rep. Tom Trail, R-Moscow, Harwood said: “I thought it was a crummy bill – we already got all that stuff in there. It was just a feel-good, fuzzy thing.”

I was somewhat chagrined that state Rep. Phil Hart, R-Athol, joined Harwood and seven other dissenters as the House voted 59-9 in favor of the resolution. Hart, a former Constitutionalist who switched to the Republican Party before his 2004 race, refused to pay his income taxes for seven years until he lost a quixotic lawsuit in which he contended that the IRS was misinterpreting the Sixteenth Amendment. Otherwise, he hasn’t been an embarrassment. Until now.

I was startled that perceptive state Rep. Bob Nonini, R-Post Falls, was counted among the naysayers.

“I just think there’s a group of people … that like to keep sore wounds opened up,” Nonini said after the House vote. “Those people (the Aryan Nations) have gone away – we don’t talk about it in North Idaho.”

Nonini, of course, is right that the Aryan Nations is gone, sued into bankruptcy by a courageous mother and her son who were attacked by goons guarding the Aryans’ former compound on the rimrock above Hayden Lake. Founder Richard Butler is dead. The compound has been razed to such an extent that it’s unrecognizable as the former site where the nation’s who’s-who of white supremacism congregated each year. Cows graze where Butler once fumed.

However, Nonini is wrong to suggest that North Idahoans should forget about the Aryans and move on.

As a former reporter, who covered the rebirth of the local human rights movement from 1984 to 1993, I heard one leader after another – from the late Bill Wassmuth to Norm Gissel and Tony Stewart – state that hate grows in a vacuum. If it’s not confronted, hate spreads, manifesting itself in attacks against mixed-race couples and children, racist mailings, marches and even violence. North Idaho experienced all those elements during the heyday of the hate brigade.

Harwood, Hart and Nonini have embraced the same misguided approach that nervous Coeur d’Alene business leaders did in the 1980s.

In a back-room showdown between human rights activists and business owners, the late Larry Broadbent, who was the Kootenai County undersheriff at the time, was asked what would happen to the Aryans if there weren’t a human rights movement to oppose them. Instead of 60 racists in the county, Broadbent said, there would be 600. Butler was trying to establish a whites-only “territorial imperative” in North Idaho. Meanwhile, business owners contended that human rights activists were helping racists by drawing attention and publicity to them.

Gissel, a Coeur d’Alene attorney who assisted Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center in the civil lawsuit that bankrupted Butler and the Aryans, admonished the nine legislators who opposed the human rights resolution: “I can’t find a single example in the history of racism where it benefited anybody to be quiet about it. … You have to have public discourse about it.”

Nonini, to his credit, has fought effectively for property tax relief and to protect water rights. House Republican leaders recognized his passion and ability earlier this winter when they appointed the sophomore legislator as chairman of the Education Committee. But he needs a crash course on human rights and the importance of elected officials to stand firm against discrimination, even for the sake of appearance. Trail’s resolution, after all, has little impact, other than to send a message to racists and to minorities who suspect lily-white Idaho remains fertile ground for intolerance.

With the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations standing watch, a 21st-century version of the Aryan Nations isn’t likely to gain another toehold. However, racism persists, as is evident by the recent settlement between Lewiston’s Wal-Mart and a black employee who’d been racially harassed for two years and then fired when he complained. Another indicator that North Idaho hasn’t arrived as a center of enlightenment is the 3,252 votes attracted by “European- American” activist Stan Hess in an unsuccessful race for a North Idaho College trustee position last November.

All elected officials from North Idaho should seize every chance to promote human rights and to denounce racism – as other North Idaho delegates did in supporting Trail’s resolution. Anything less encourages ideologues still seeking a home for their hateful creed.