It was another stop on the popular departing governor's farewell tour.
He was in rare form, except in regard to the rapidly emerging matter of same-sex marriage. On that his form was all too common.
It was mostly good stuff from Gov. Mike Beebe. It seemed to be enjoyed fully by about 175 persons at a fundraiser Wednesday for the nonprofit LifeQuest organization that provides classes and activities for seniors.
At 9 a.m. today on the Talk Business and Politics program on KATV, Channel 7, you can view snippets of this hour's conversation I had with the governor about his political career now ending. Or you can see the full discussion sometime after that at talkbusiness.net.
When I expressed my concern for Beebe's sanity as he enters a quiet nonpublic life after more than three decades spent obsessively running part or all of state government, Beebe said not to worry. He said he'd applied to become a Voices page columnist.
Eventually we turned serious.
It's his fault, he admitted, that the permitting process proceeded under public radar for the large hog farm in the Buffalo National River watershed. His administration could and should have sounded a public alarm earlier, he said.
He gave such a stirring defense of his intention to grant his son a pardon for a probated marijuana possession conviction--saying the easier course would have been to treat his own son unfairly--that the audience applauded.
It was hubris, no doubt, that gave me the idea that I could extract for history from the governor a major acknowledgement--that, notwithstanding his public comments, he actually had no problem with gays marrying each other.
Yet he gave ground only to say he had become more supportive in recent years of certain legal rights for persons in same-sex relationships and households. But he said he still opposes same-sex marriage because ... well, all he could offer was that he guesses that's just the way he was raised.
There may exist worthy reasons to disallow licensed marriage among same-sex couples. I've not yet heard them. But the way some unaffected party was raised is surely the lamest of excuses.
Many of us were raised at a time of open race prejudice. That rearing should not be--must never be--a dominant definer of our attitudes for a full lifetime. Instead it's something to be overcome.
Our lives should be spent honoring and applying the sound values and loving nurturing of our raising, while also developing our independent thinking to evolve past any foul or destructive influences.
What Beebe must have been saying--not unlike what a slim majority of Fayetteville voters had said the day before in repealing an ordinance banning job discrimination against gays--was that he finds gayness to be sinful and thus outside the realm of standard grants of rights and privileges.
The fatal flaw in that thinking ought to be obvious: We do not, in this generally free country, impose civil sanctions and deny rights on the basis of activity we believe to be sinful. That's unless the activity causes purposeful and demonstrated harm to innocent bystanders and our society generally.
Killing is a sin and murder is a crime for which the penalty is appropriately severe. Adultery is a sin, but Bill Clinton only got impeached for it, not convicted. He certainly did not get removed from his pretty-good job as president of the United States.
Even if you find gayness to be sinful, surely you can agree that, along the continuum of sin to crime, it is more akin to Clinton's peccadilloes than a murderer's life-taking assault.
Murder leaves a permanent mark on the public population. Armed robbery leaves a permanent mark on your publicly evident property.
But we can't possibly round up all the peccadillo perpetrators for revocations of rights of citizenship. They number far too many. And so many peccadillo perpetrators do their perpetrating privately.
Though he didn't say so, and actually seemed to want to be shed of the issue as quickly as possible, Beebe perhaps shares that clichéd belief that gay marriage would damage traditional heterosexual marriage.
But, so far, most of the states that have legalized gay marriage have maintained some of the nation's lowest divorce rates among heterosexual couples.
If you want to see nationally lofty divorce-rate rankings, look around the place we lovingly call Arkansas.
Married gay people have not hurt me in the least. Those I've had the opportunity to spend time with have been uncommonly kind and enriching. And I'd wager they haven't remotely injured our outgoing governor either. To the contrary, some have done great work for his administration.
And I still believe--I, in fact, insist--that he knows it. Knows better.
Beebe didn't run for governor until it was the very right time. Maybe he's just waiting for the very right time to tell this particular truth.
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 on 12/14/2014