He Was Trespassed... From a Church

Scott Herndon loves a church. He preached at the farmers' market whether you wanted him to or not, campaigns as the last line of defense for Christian families, and ran the Bonner County Republican Party like a Sunday school with a grudge. So you'd think a church would be the one place he could go without a sheriff's deputy getting involved. You'd be wrong. On Sunday, April 25, 2021, Herndon and his wife rolled up to the Cocolalla Cowboy Church, where staff asked them to leave. Herndon's response, per the Bonner County Sheriff's report, was to get "verbally confrontational" and demand the pastor come out and explain himself. The pastor did. According to the deputy, the Herndons "continued to be confrontational" and started making accusations that "didn't seem connected with the issue," including the theory that they were being thrown out because of Black Lives Matter. At a cowboy church. In Cocolalla. Pastor Steve Bradshaw apparently decided this wasn't a conversation worth having, walked away, and had the deputy trespass both Herndons from the property for a full year. The deputy, for the record, was there on a completely unrelated call and only figured out he'd be banning a future state senator from a house of worship when he "heard the commotion in the parking lot."

The next morning Herndon called the deputy, "frustrated," because in his view the church should have just phoned ahead to tell his family they weren't welcome instead of saying it to his face. Imagine being so hard to be around that your complaint is the church didn't ban you more politely. He never disputed any of it. Three years later, when Herndon was leading a crusade to strip Bradshaw of his county commissioner seat, Bradshaw told the Sandpoint Reader that Herndon was "still sore that he was trespassed from the Cowboy Church." Herndon's rebuttal: "I never held [the trespass] against the guy." Sure. He just tried to remove the guy from office. Here's the thing about Scott Herndon: the farmers' market vendors asked him to tone it down, the Festival asked him to leave his gun in the truck, and a pastor asked him to leave a parking lot. Every one of them got a confrontation, a lawsuit, or a political campaign for their trouble. If a cowboy church can't find a way to coexist with this man, what chance does the Idaho Senate have?