FAYETTEVILLE — Lawmakers are getting pressure to move beyond social issues such as gun rights and abortion, legislators said at a forum hosted Friday by the Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce.

“I’ve had calls from people who say ‘I voted Republican so you’d do something about the economy. When are you going to do that?’” said Sen. Jon Woods, R-Springdale.

Woods and other legislators assured the audience other priorities were being worked on, but that abortion and other issues weren’t as inter-related. “If you cut one tax before looking at all the options, you might not have the money left to cut another tax,” said Sen. Kim Hendren, R-Gravette. The Legislature doesn’t want to rush but that doesn’t mean the issues aren’t being worked on.

Rep. Charlie Collins, R-Fayetteville, agreed, calling the process “like a Rubik’s cube. All the panels seem mixed up until right before the puzzle is solved, then they all match.”

Constituents are frustrated not only because social legislation appears to preempt all other legislative business, said Kathleen Paulson. The social legislation getting priority won’t stand up in federal court, she said.

“Will the people who vote for this please pay for it?” Paulson said, referring to the costs of defending these cases in court. There are private groups that will assist the state in defending these laws, said Rep. Justin Harris, R-West Fork. Will they bear all the expense, Paulson asked. No, the state attorney general is still the state’s chief counsel, Harris replied.

Rep. Randy Alexander, R-Springdale, said the abortion issue isn’t as simple as it seemed in 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court made the landmark Roe vs. Wade decision that made access to an abortion constitutionally protected. At that time, the definition of when life began dominated the issue. “The court, in essence, said ‘We don’t know,’” Alexander said. Forty years later, the opinion of many Americans haven’t changed — they don’t support abortions of what can be unambiguously defined as a human baby — but the definition of when a baby is a human being has.

Paulson, a gynecologist, said her experience is the attitudes of many on abortion change dramatically when they discover pregnancy with a severely handicapped child who will, in all probability, die and be an emotional and financial disaster to the family involved, which often includes other children.

That’s why the final abortion law that did pass allowed an exception in cases where there is clearly not a viable pregnancy, and medical science has improved enough to make those determinations more definite than they were at the time of Roe vs. Wade, Alexander said.

In other issues, Hendren said whether or not to approve the proposed Big River Steel project is a major hurdle the Legislature is wrestling with. If the Legislature approves the deal, it could bring a $1.1 billion steel mill and an estimated 525 jobs to east Arkansas. The multimillion dollar package of incentives and tax breaks is so large, though, the impact on the state’s overall budget must be assessed before taking action, Hendren said.