September 10, 2026
Protect and Defend
By: Julianne Young
This year’s State Fair Parade reflected our enthusiasm for America’s 250th, festive from the first moment. First came rows of Scouts with American flags. Then more law enforcement vehicles than I have ever seen in one parade — one from nearly every department and county in eastern Idaho! Then came the Army National Guard. As I watched them march by, intense gratitude welled up inside me, spilling onto my cheeks.
You don’t get emotional watching something you take for granted. You get emotional watching something you’ve sacrificed to protect, and are afraid to lose. I’ve never worn a military uniform. But I’ve had the privilege of giving time, talents, and means protecting and defending the things that make Idaho so beautiful.
It’s no accident that Idaho was just named the best state in the country to live in, according to WalletHub’s 2026 ranking of all fifty states on affordability, safety, income growth, and quality of life. This is the fruit of policy choices deliberately pursued, year after year, by a state willing to defend a line other states have abandoned.
Idaho has protected families, refusing to treat parents as obstacles to their children’s upbringing and preserving common-sense public policies like sex-separated sports and private facilities. It has kept communities safe with strong, anti-drug laws rather than treating recreational drug use as public health policy. We have protected life, refusing to treat our next generation as disposable. These choices have not always been popular. Left-leaning headlines have long condemned these positions as backward. Idaho is rarely accused of being ordinary, and the wallet hub survey confirms this. It seems we’ve done some things unusually right.
Like all worthwhile things, this can’t be taken for granted. The values that have made Idaho uniquely good are under attack on your ballot this November.
For example, Proposition 1 would strip away Idaho’s pro-life protections, replacing them with one of the most radical pro-abortion laws in the country — a broad “right to reproductive freedom” that includes unregulated abortion on demand up until a baby could survive outside the womb without a doctor or parental consent. Proponents know it’s a hard sell on its merits, so the campaign leans, instead, on false claims that Idaho women can’t get treated for miscarriages or other complications.
The truth: Idaho Code specifically exempts miscarriage from the definition of abortion, so miscarriage care falls outside the law’s reach entirely. Conflating miscarriage with abortion is a deceptive strategy — and not a particularly original one. Fear has always been easier to manufacture than a sound argument when defending a bad idea.
HJR 4, also on the ballot, is a different kind of fight, offering to protect Idaho from wealthy out-of-state drug interests. Interests that profit from legalized marijuana, psychedelics, and other substances excel at marketing initiatives directly to voters. Like the miscarriage ads for abortion, they spam voters with misleading emotional ads which only have to be convincing, not true. In contrast, our legislative process requires public hearings, expert testimony, and a chance for opposing evidence — all of which make bad ideas harder to sell. HJR 4 doesn’t take the question of drug-legalization off the table. It just insists that if Idaho legalizes something this consequential, the change goes through a transparent, accountable process on the public record, not through a deluge of thirty-second commercials. HJR 4 mirrors language already in Idaho’s Constitution giving the legislature authority to regulate alcohol, and applies it to drugs.
When the sirens and excitement of this year’s parade have long since faded into the distance, the values represented by each uniform in it will remain. While others have stopped defending these values, Idaho has not.
So when the ads come — and they will, through November — the answer isn’t to soften the positions that got us here, or apologize for a state that is leading rather than following everyone else’s failing playbook. The results of that leadership are reflected in black and white in the WalletHub ranking. No amount of out-of-state money or manufactured fear changes that math.
May we remember that we celebrate 250 years of independence because a nation was willing to defend what it believed in, even when it would have been easier not to. Let’s celebrate our own corner of that nation, built one deliberate choice at a time, by continuing to do the same. Two hundred fifty years from now, someone should look back and say Idaho held the line when it counted — without apology, on the things that made this the best place in the country to live.
Julianne Young is a Bingham County Mom who loves faith, family, and freedom; a former state representative; founder of the nonprofit Idaho Family Strong; regional coordinator for Idaho Chooses Life; and 2nd Vice Chair of the Idaho State GOP.
