It's time to vote against IFF candidates

The Idaho Freedom Foundation sent me an urgent but misleading message as follows:

“DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) ... divides the world into aggrieved minorities and oppressive majorities, reducing people to a group identity grounded in immutable characteristics ... focused on group identity and discrimination such as a Black student center, LGBT center, or women's center ... engrain DEI in campus policies through speech codes or race and gender quotas among other discriminatory practices ... “revolutionizing American higher education for at least the last two generations.”

Well, we all agree that black skin, for example, is an immutable characteristic. But far from “reducing” people and “discriminating” against them by considering this fact, DEI presents the idea that the human right to be treated equally is also immutable. (The E in DEI (“equity”) means “equality.”) Defending the equality of people is the very description of NOT discriminating among them.

American higher education (not to mention the United States) has always stood for equality, even before independence. Then, it was a revolutionary idea, but not anymore.

Teaching equality costs money. But what could be more worth teaching than that “all men are created equal”? And I don't mean just men.

The IFF attack on DEI is part of their aim to do away with public education. Vote against IFF-supported candidates, such as our own Bonner County Republican Committee Chair.

NANCY GERTH

Sandpoint