I know. I understand the readership.
I’ve written too much lately on same-sex marriage. I’ve lathered entirely too much attention on that attention hound, meaning what’s-his-name from Bigelow and/or Conway.
I suspect the gay-marriage issue makes you a tad uncomfortable. You’d like a break. You’d rather see arrows or a swift kick to Tom Cotton.
You’d even prefer a visit with Bubba McCoy, who, by the way, thinks the country is already bankrupt and that letting the gays and lesbians marry each other is, while an abomination, a post-demise abomination.
Here’s Bubba’s money quote: “This is all up to the Chinese anyway. They own us. Just ask them what they think about the gays marrying each other and be done with it.”
That Bubba is quite the card, isn’t he?
The problem is that there is timely news on this wearying issue. It is news that will unfold nationally and locally in the next couple of days.
On Thursday, conservative groups will hold the second annual March for Marriage in Washington. It is an event seeking to rally public defense of traditional man-woman marriage against the raging tide.
It is a tide by which 16 courts consecutively around the country, both federal and state, have declared same-sex marriage bans unconstitutional.
It is a tide by which Gallup puts public support for gay marriage at 55 percent in its latest poll.
Among the speakers will be San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, whose congresswoman, Nancy Pelosi, has publicly urged him to pull out because the event amounts to “venom masquerading as virtue.”
She may have been referring in part to one of the scheduled featured speakers. That would be Mike Huckabee, our former governor transplanted to the income-tax haven of Florida.
The Huckster is on record saying that Pulaski Circuit Judge Chris Piazza should be impeached for imposing constitutional principles over the prejudice of the Arkansas people. In that regard, Huckabee has out-Raperted even Jason Rapert, a state senator and the aforementioned attention hound.
Rapert invoked the idea of impeachment, but then retreated when legislative colleagues told him impeachment was too drastic. Rather than appear ineffective in the Legislature, Rapert got this newspaper to agree to let him write an over-long essay saying he never favored impeachment in the first place.
Jason is all about winning. And he will win big on Friday. That will be the second news development.
His resolution condemning Piazza and urging the Arkansas Supreme Court to overturn his ruling will be passed easily by the Legislative Council.
It failed last month only because, as a late addition to the agenda, a two-thirds vote was required to consider it. State Rep. John Edwards, acting chairman, ruled that a two-thirds vote of both the House and Senate memberships was required. The two-thirds majority among voting senators was not achieved.
When I moderated a legislative panel recently, I asked participants if they were at all hesitant to abuse the separation of powers doctrine. By that I meant presuming in a formal resolution to encourage the Arkansas Supreme Court to rule a certain way on a specific and active appeal.
The legislators said it was no big deal. They said the courts try to tell legislatures what to do all the time.
Meantime, one more thing about Brother Rapert, tacked at the end so as to minimize its significance: He posted on his Facebook page Sunday that people who disagreed with American values and the Bible — meaning his opinion of American values and the Bible — should feel free to cross our porous borders and vacate the country.
It would certainly open up a lot more elbow room for the fundamentalist Christian theocrats if the 55 percent of us pegged by Gallup were to leave.
I don’t want to leave, but, if I must, I intend to keep emailing my columns to the newspaper.
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.