LITTLE ROCK — The Arkansas Legislature is well along in the process of passing a law for guns in church.
It sounds radical, certainly irreligious and perhaps insane.
But on this rare occasion, and in this limited instance, I’d like to make the point that the measure is not as bad as it sounds.
Years ago our Legislature enacted a law allowing citizens to get permits to carry concealed weapons. Then the Legislature made a mistake. As usual, it felt obliged to over-legislate. It inserted a series of excepted locations from this gun-toting authority.
One of those specified no-gun places, fatefully, was church.
What that did was put state government in the business of telling churches what they couldn’t do.
The Constitution would seem to frown on that, and the Good Lord might.
So it turns out that there are all kinds of churches in Arkansas, some weirder than others.
Over the years, state legislators have heard from some of their more gun-crazed and fearful churchgoers that they don’t like this exception. They think they ought to have the right to take their otherwise legal concealed guns into worship services just in case some crazed marauder breaks into the sanctuary and opens fire.
They say that big, rich churches in the cities can afford security guards, but that they are helpless in the hinterlands if unarmed. It’s a standard rural/gun thing.
This is the third go-round for the filing of a bill to repeal that church exception.
Inevitably the media-and you know how we are-barrel in to report the matter as “guns in church.” But it’s mostly removing a constitutionally dubious imposition on religion.
The first two attempts failed, but this one may go through.
That’s because it has been stripped to the bone. The church exception is left in, but wording is added immediately afterward to this practical effect: Of course all individual church decisions shall be made by the overseers of the churches and nothing in the law infringes that.
So, basically, all the bill does is declare the abundant truth that elders, bishops, deacons-folks like that-run their churches.
A few churches-probably a very few-will now decide to allow licensed concealed weapons. Most won’t. It’s up to them.
If we had legislated with glorious and wise minimalism in the first place-simply setting up a system for concealed-weapon licensing and dared not mentioned churches at all-we wouldn’t be having to endure this folderol currently.
The guy in the pew next to you might be packing, but it wouldn’t be a matter of national news.
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On another issue, I went to the Capitol on Tuesday to see the big steel-plant announcement for Osceola. In the course thereof, I picked up a little item about Democratic senators being irked at Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe.
Understandably irked.
Appropriately irked.
Righteously irked.
Senate Democrats are beleaguered anyway, since there are only 14 of them in the 35-member Senate. But at least they thought they had the governor on their side.
A few days ago some of them were approached by state Sen. Jason Rapert, extremist Republican of Conway. He handed them a copy of the governor’scenterpiece legislation-a populist and popular bill to complete the governor’s drawdown of the sales tax on groceries as budget developments allow-and said he would be sponsoring the measure for the governor.
I have been advised as to several Democratic senatorial responses, most of them profane. “Are you [bleeping] kidding me?” was one.
There are two issues here, in ascending order of significance.
Democratic senators were at least due the courtesy of a heads-up, which they didn’t get.
Jason Rapert? Jason Rapert?
Bipartisanship is one thing, and a good thing. But Rapert is singularly the most grandstanding right-wing blowhard in the Republican caucus.
Until the last couple of weeks, he hasn’t been taken seriously, whether proposing a national constitutional convention or wanting to abolish income taxes for persons-all persons-happening to live in poorer counties.
More than that, a moderate Democratic governor with near-70 percent approval has placed his imprimatur on the Republican senator who is lead sponsor of another bill-unconstitutional, of course.
That is the one to force women seeking legal abortions to endure a transvaginal probe by a doctor for signs of a fetal heartbeat, in which case she couldn’t get the legal abortion without the doctor going to prison.
So the sponsor of this atrocity to women is now the governor’s bosom ally on Beebe’s treasured effort to get rid of the sales tax on groceries.
Beebe told me, by way of explanation, that Rapert was the first to ask, and that he seeks bipartisanship.
I’m for bipartisanship, but not so much for betrayal of women.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial, Pages 17 on 01/31/2013