Cole LeFavour & Add the Words History

Cole’s Work for Idaho’s successful No On One Campaign
Cole LeFavour was hired in 1993 as statewide Volunteer Coordinator for the Decline to Sign Campaign and for the No On One Campaign which defeated Idaho’s 1994 anti-gay ballot initiative. The win gave Idaho’s queer community hope that progress was possible in LGBT rights in the state they love.

Your Family, Friends and Neighbors Co-Chair
Cole joined the board of directors of YFFN in 1995 after the end of the No On One Campaign. She served as Co-Chair for the organization and as Pride Co-Chair and co-led the social organization Women’s Night which held quarterly dances and monthly coffee shop events. From 1995 to 2000 these featured music, theater, poetry and political organizing woven together. The events welcomed through their doors all who identified as a women, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

From 1996 to 2003, as part of YFFN’s Speak Out Idaho project, Cole, Javier Smith, MaryEvelyn Smith, Lori Watts and other Idaho LGBT leaders brought groups of gay and transgender people and their parents into the capitol to educate legislators on what it is like to live as a gay or transgender person and face harassment, bullying, violence, loss of a job, or refusal of business services in Idaho.

Idaho LGBT Survey
In 2003 Cole and staff member Ollie Shannon spent three months traveling the state gathering over 2000 lengthy surveys from LGBT people at events, businesses, workplaces, and in public places. The work was funded by the Idaho Tobacco Disparities Working Group and produced volumes of data on discrimination, hate crimes, substance use, stressors and characteristics of Idaho’s LGBT communities. For comparison, 500 surveys were gathered from non-lgbt participants.

Idaho’s First Openly Gay Elected Official
After extensive work with the Idaho Center on Budget and Tax Policy and having worked the 2004 legislative session as a lobbyist for the Idaho Community Action Network, lobbying on health care and consumer protection issues, in April 2004 Cole filed to run for the Idaho House of Representatives. She was challenged by two primary opponents, Brian Cronin and former Canyon County legislator Steve Scanlin, both of whom had deep connections in the Democratic Party.

Running on a public transportation funding, fair tax policy, and environmental platform, LeFavour was told she had no chance of defeating a republican opponent because she was gay. However, with the help of campaign staff including Oliver Shannon, campaign advisors and volunteers Lauren McClain, Rachel Winer, Maria Andrade, Lee Flinn, Roger Sherman, and many key members of Idaho’s Progressive Community, along with the national Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, Cole knocked thousands of doors, raised record-setting numbers of local and national campaign donations and won the three-way primary with 54% of the vote. She went on to defeat her Republican opponent with 67% of the vote and was sworn into the Idaho House of Representatives in December of 2004.

In 2005 Representative LeFavour was able to work from the inside rather than the outside of the legislature to defeat efforts to pass an anti-gay constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. For two years, she worked with the Idaho Senate’s key block of seven Republican state Senators led by Joe Stegner, Sheila Sorensen, Brad Little, and Lair Noah. Together with 7 Democratic Senators, the 14 stopped the marriage ban from gaining the 2/3 majority it needed in order to pass the Senate. In 2006 the seven Republicans faced intense pressure from LDS leadership and the marriage ban gained the 2/3 majority needed to be placed on the ballot. Though Idaho organizations worked to oppose the ban and LeFavour led an effort to design and fund last minute statewide mailing in opposition to the ban, it passed with 63% of the vote, amending Idaho’s constitution to prohibit all forms of legal recognition for same sex couples.

In 2006, LeFavour, Pam Baldwin, Judy Cross, Lee Flinn and others from the Idaho Women’s Network, ACLU of Idaho, Interfaith Alliance, and Your Family Friends and Neighbors formed a coalition to work at passing legislation to end discrimination against gay and transgender people in employment, housing and education. However, for six years Republicans did not even permit a public hearing on the issue. Even after Cole successfully gathered Republican co-sponsors, it was not until 2010 that a bill ever allowed to be formally “printed” or introduced into the Senate. In 2010 the Idaho Safe Schools and Fair Employment Working Group began organizing to bring statewide pressure to bear and to gather business sponsors for Senate bill 1033 which proposed to amend the Idaho Human Rights Act to include the terms sexual orientation and gender identity.

Ultimately, in 2010, Senators LeFavour and Malepeai’s efforts to pass legislation were rejected on a party-line vote in committee. Devastated, the Idaho Safe Schools and Fair Employment Working group created Add the Words which began a campaign to pressure legislators in the 2011 session using personal messages hand written on sticky notes and stuck to the glass doors of the Senate and House chambers and committee rooms, telling law makers stories of discrimination and asking them to pass legislation to “Add the Words” sexual orientation and gender identity to Idaho’s Human Rights Act. Add the Words formed a political Action Committee (PAC) under the leadership and statewide organizing efforts of Emily Jackson-Edney, Mistie Tolman, Cody Haefer, Lindsay Matson, Cole and others. Listen to the 2011 Interview with Senator LeFavour by Dina Denny.

In late 2011 after Cole gathered republican co-sponsors including Senators Tim Corder, John Andreason, Chuck Coiner, Tom Trail. Former Senate Republican leader Bill Roden agreed to present the bill, Add the Words organized statewide holding huge rallies with over 3000 people in attendance. While the sticky note campaign delivered over 1000 messages to senate leaders from all over Idaho, still no public hearing or genuine effort to pass an add the words bill was allowed to proceed. Something had to change.

Clearly there was a need for greater pressure and attention focused on Idaho lawmakers who, for nearly two decades had easily ignored efforts at educating, lobbying, politely gathering in mass at the capitol and even at negotiating to try to reach compromises that would address some of the concerns often expressed by leadership about the impact of non-discrimination protections.

In 2013 it was quietly agreed that a separate group should form, focusing on training people for peaceful, respectful demonstration and carefully planned acts of civil disobedience beginning in the 2014 legislative session. Out of this “Add the 4 Words, Idaho” was born, not as an organization, but as a simple group of people determined to ensure that the violence and the despair that Idaho adults and teens face every day in our state did not go ignored. For Add the 4 Words, Cole LeFavour and Judy Cross designed a training and Cole and Ty Carson led trainings with Joe Kibbe, Judy, Ollie Shannon, James Blazor, James Blakely, Sharon Gregory, Meredith Butts, Ash Loosli-Thomson and many others working as trainers in the role plays and legal discussion that was essential to preparing for civil disobedience. Through the fall of 2013 and winter of 2014 Cole raised funds, talked to lawyers, organized bail bonds and continued these trainings, preparing almost 300 people to participate in silent peaceful protests in the Capitol. See the film “Add the Words.” HERE

The first arrests took place on February 3, 2014 at the three doors of the Senate Chamber, after all efforts to present or pass a bill through the Senate had been publicly rejected by Senate President ProTem Brent Hill. USAToday

Feb. 3 2014 AP News

On January 16th 2015, after over 120 arrests had already taken place the previous year in the Senate, a hearing was finally granted to allow the House State Affairs Committee to vote on a bill adding the two terms “sexual orientation, gender identity” to the Idaho Human Rights Act. After two full days and hundreds of people coming from all over the state to testify, the vote in the 17 member house committee fell along party lines with all 13 Republicans voting no. Stories here.

After the defeat of the bill, Cole, Ty Carson and David Thompson created a short film, “Transgender Faces in the Capitol” to humanize Idaho’s transgender and gender non-conforming community which was brutally mischaracterized by religious extremists in the House hearing on the Add the Word bill.

In 2015, Ty Carson and Joseph Kibbe formed the Include Us Idaho PAC to lobby legislators on the Add the Words issue. Separate from the Add the Words Coalition, in 2017 and 2018 Cole together with Add the 4 Words Organizers Denae Carson, Mike Caughey, and Aodhan Crawford continued to organize lobbying, focusing on issues of gender identity.

In 2017 Cole, Ollie Shannon, Rabi Dan Fink, Caleb Hansen and others from Add the 4 Words organized a powerful non-arrest demonstration in the house and senate. Participants carried signs describing acts of violence and discrimination faced by LGBT people from around the state.

In 2019 the Add the Words Coalition brought activists and community members into the statehouse, including the parents Boise State University Professor Steven Nelson. The Nelsons came to hold a sign commemorating their son’s violent death in a 2016 Nampa hate crime. The Add the Words organization itself has become an Idaho non-profit organization led by Chelsea Gaona Lincoln. The Add the Words Coalition is a cooperative project with much of its organizing work led by ACLU lobbyist, Kathy Griesmyer, and former Add the Words leader and organizer Mistie Tolman, now a director at Planned Parenthood Votes. The ACLU of Idaho, Add the Words itself along with the Interfaith Alliance, the Pride Foundation and other organizations in 2019 all participated in pressuring legislative leaders to make progress on amending Idaho’s Human Rights act to include gay and gender non-conforming people.

As early as 2016, Former Senator LeFavour noted Senate leaders had become open to protections in employment and housing with resistance remaining in the provision of “public accommodation” or business and public services. Each year she has presented House and Senate leadership with compromise language that carefully defines the limits of Idaho’s human rights act to restrict free speech in compelling cake bakers, t-shirt makers and other business owners to produce custom products containing speech to which they object. The compromise has, in different forms, spelled out specifically that cake bakers and other business owners must sell the exact same products and provide the same services to gay and transgender customers that they would sell to other customers. Nonetheless, Senate leader Brent Hill has repeatedly considered and then rejected the compromise language. Even in 2019, he participated in a religious freedom and LGBT rights forms and refused to pass legislation to end discrimination, instead leaving tens of thousands of Idahoans to face increasing hostility and threats to their safety. Meanwhile national policies have grown more hostile to gender non-conforming Americans, gaining more ground each year under the Trump administration.

Today, sadly, Idaho has one of the highest teen suicide rates in the nation and has seen increases in biased violence including the tragic killing of Professor Steven Nelson in 2016. Nelson was beaten to death in Canyon County just a half hour’s drive from the State Capitol building in Boise.

In spite of the lack of state policy addressing discrimination, a few major cities in the state have passed local policy which bans private employers from firing, evicting and refusing to sell goods and services to gay and transgender people.

Idaho continues to be home to a vast community of queer business owners, workers, artists, students, and professionals. While most businesses support the inclusion of sexual orientation and Idaho’s human rights act, Senator Hill and others argue that they must continue to refuse to pass basic civil rights into law in order to allow business owners of Mormon/ L.D.S. and other faiths to do harm to gay and transgender people as they feel their religions dictate.

In 2020, Senator Hill and other L.D.S. leaders in the House and Senate have rejected the possibility of progress on an Add the Words or Human Rights act bill. They instead proposed three separate bills targeting harm at transgender youth and adults and a separate bill banning affirmative action in state agencies. To date, under the leadership of retiring Senate President Pro Tem Hill and Speaker Scott Bedke, all but one of the bills passed the legislature. House bill’s, 440a, 500a and 509 became law. However HB500a banning transgender and intersex girls from girls from participating in school sports has been blocked by the courts.

For More on House Bill 500a see Cole’s Soundcloud POD CAST Queer as Idaho.

Other LINKS:

Cole LeFavour Will Be Missed.

“Idaho Senator Tries to Add the Words”

More on Boise State Public Radio

More than 200 Idaho Press and Boise Weekly articles

Over 200 articles spanning Col’e legislative career Eye on Boise / Spokesman-Review by Betsy Russell

Cole has been interviewed as part of Boise State University’s Idaho LGBT History Project. The 2011 interview by Dina Denny covers her coming out, work on the No On One Campaign, Boise Hate Crimes, her work with Republican Co-sponsors in the Idaho House and Senate and optimism about passage of legislation to end discrimination in 2011.

(The Library of Congress has archived that part of Cole’s web site which contains information on early bills, sponsors, organizing work, messaging, statewide events and photographs from 2011.) Idaho Safe Schools and Fair Employment Working Group