Posts published in May 2025

Tony Park, who died earlier this month at 90, through his long public life came across as cheerful, friendly, almost easy going; watch him over time and you saw someone who could laugh without strain and accept setbacks as they came.

Not, you might say, the kind of personality type you’d usually expect as a stereotype state attorney general. Which he was, in fact, at the time when I first came to Idaho about a half-century ago.

He managed to reach that high office, and lost it, in part because of another quality, a willingness to walk headfirst into a hurricane, to jump into a political contest even when the timing was off and the environment was not favorable. Adverse circumstances did not seem to throw him.

That might be the side of him you’d most guess at from the title of his memoir, An Idaho Democrat. (Disclosure here: I published it in 2021.) He subtitled the book, “A political memoir of a political life,” and though he had a full life in other areas - including a law career long prominent in Idaho - that told you something about his priorities and concerns.

He spoke to that too, directly: “My purpose in this endeavor [writing the memoir] is to demonstrate through my personal experiences and progression how the Idaho political landscape—particularly regarding Democrats—has changed in the latter half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, despite the fact that many issues so important to Democrats, such as taking care of working people, the environment, the problems with one-party rule, etc., are as urgent now as they were when I got my start.”

Looking back, we often forget the losses and the downsides of political and government careers; the successes get the celebrations. Park learned from both ups and down, and he didn’t shy away from them.

As a young Boise attorney, he ran for the Idaho Legislature twice in the 60s, losing both times. (Boise, now Democratic, was a solidly Republican city then, more so than the state overall.) That didn’t stop him from taking on a bigger race, for attorney general, in 1970, and winning. Persistence was one of the lessons he learned.

Timing cut the other direction in 1972, when not halfway through his statewide term he ran for an open U.S. Senate seat: The lure was irresistible, as open Senate seats don’t come along often. But he wasn’t well enough established - “It was simply too soon for me to run,” he would write later -  and he didn’t make it through the primary. The timing, which also involved the successful candidacy of Republican James McClure, who was the front runner in the contest from start to finish, was bad this time.

Another lesson came when he agreed (on request from Governor Cecil Andrus) to take over the state investigative unit on illegal drugs, a group that famously became known as “Park’s Narcs.” It did not go well; the group became the subject of a number of scandalous headlines that damaged the new attorney general, even as he made well-received moves on other subjects.

But Park never avoided the subject - he devoted a chapter of his memoir to it - and learned from it the need to properly control, manage and situate sensitive government operations. Had he stayed in government -  he lost his bid for reelection in 1974 - the lessons he absorbed might have resulted in some useful government management.

When Park died, some of the comments about him suggest an artifact from a bygone, and in many ways a politically better, era.

I suspect he would see it a little differently.

Conditions and timing and hurricanes be damned: Walk into the whirlwind. Sometimes you can win and make a difference. Not always, but maybe enough.

In the northern Idaho university city of Moscow, Christ Church, a Christian nationalist center of national note, is an ongoing controversy. A few miles away at the town of Troy, it has become a federal case.

Like many communities anchored by higher education, Moscow long has leaned blue (usually voting Democratic for major offices), and the growing Christ Church community and its leader Doug Wilson have been a counterweight to that. More than that, really.

It is much more than just a church where people gather to worship, though that is part of it. The entities associated with it include a small religious college (St. Andrews), a private school, a publishing house and more. Its philosophical stance is distinctive, its focus on “traditional” family and gender roles is on the cultural edge. In 2004 Wilson set up a conference arguing that slavery created “a genuine affection between the races.” And so on.

But that is not all either. One analyst, Heath Druzin, who has examined the church extensively, said that “What Doug Wilson wants to do, according to Doug Wilson, is change society; create an American theocracy.”

It is a force in the community. It may have been a decisive factor in local legislative races, and has been active in city politics. A significant part of downtown is now owned by the church or its allies. Wilson’s view of its future clearly is not that of being just one element of the community among many. When his church proclaims (as it does on its website) “our desire is to make Moscow a Christian town,” it means their kind of Christian, not anyone else’s, and dominated by their church.

This hasn’t gone unnoticed. Last December about 200 people gathered in Moscow to consider how to respond to the growing group, prompted in part by a recent podcast about it that has had more than a million downloads.

Christ Church also proclaims on its website “a regular series of church plants on the Palouse.” Troy, presumably, would be one of them.

One University of Idaho wag famously remarked that without the university, Moscow would be known as “the gateway to Troy,” but Troy is nothing like Moscow, and is much like most of the smaller communities in northern Idaho and in Latah County. With a population of about 900, it is conservative and Republican in its voting. In 2024 Donald Trump won its precinct 546-230, Republican Representative Russ Fulcher 532-226 and Republican state Senator Dan  Foreman (who has had harsh things to say about Moscow) 478-330. That’s a pattern consistent over recent years.

So you might think a proposal to plant an outpost of Christ Church in Troy would go over well. It has not. That city’s government, reacting to public attitudes, has blocked an attempt by a Christ Church member to set up a regular Sunday morning meeting in a downtown Troy location (a building owned by the church member).

It hasn’t. And it’s now literally a federal case - a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice., alleging that the city’s action has blocked Christ Church’s freedom of religion, a violation of federal law. DOJ said: “The lawsuit alleges that Christ Church had outgrown the space where it had been worshipping and was unable to find a space to rent. It then sought a CUP [conditional use permit] to operate a church in the City’s C-1 [commercial industrial] zoning district, where nonreligious assembly uses such as clubs, museums, auditoriums, and art galleries were allowed. Local residents vociferously opposed the Church’s CUP application, and many of their written and verbal comments reflected animus against Christ Church’s beliefs. In its denial of the Church’s CUP application, the City cited the fact that the public was ‘heavily against’ it and that the ‘great majority of the city residents’ opposed granting the CUP.”

Put aside for a moment the regulatory and legal details, which seem a little murky in places. Consider instead the attitudes being uncovered here.

Motivations are hard to assess conclusively. But, was the opposition in Troy really about the church and its doctrine and spiritual beliefs or about the larger political and social picture of what Christ Church locally is seeking to be and do?

Put another way: Might it be that the people of Troy aren’t too keen on the idea of being taken over?