Running roughshod

State Sen. Jason Rapert of Bigelow, who represents the Lord and Faulkner County, in that order, has had it up to here with these dadgummed minorities.

You can go online and search for "Jason Rapert minorities" and easily find a video clip of what I'm talking about.

You'll discover that, in October 2011 at a Tea Party rally on the state Capitol steps, Rapert, a preacher among other things, got into his finest Swaggart-like mode.

He declared in the noblest revivalist cant: "I hear you loud and clear, Barack Obama. You don't represent the country that I grew up with. And your values is not going to save us. We're going to take this country back for the Lord. We're going to try to take this country back for conservatism. And we're not going to allow minorities to run roughshod over what you people believe in."

Rapert subsequently apologized that he had "went on too long" in those remarks. He should have said "gone on" or "run on," and his previous comment should have been "values are," not "values is."

But grammatical correctness is surely a minority interest. I do not wish to run roughshod over the language misuse that the majority perhaps believes in.


Some knee-jerk liberals got outraged that Rapert was assailing black people in those pronouncements. But, as is my custom, I defended him at the time, and do so again now.

Brother Rapert was not racist in his preaching. He was assailing people not on account of skin color. He was assailing people on account of disagreeing with him ... and thus, of course, with Jesus Christ.

As you know, Jesus never took up for a persecuted minority. Our Lord was a run-with-the-mob type, a holy go-along.

He once said: Let anybody who wishes to throw a rock at this adulteress fire away forthwith.

(I'm assuming adultery is a minority practice, though reliable statistics are unavailable.)

Another time, Jesus told the diminutive tax collector to stay in the tree where he belonged because tax collectors were no-good minorities. And now we can see that the IRS is running roughshod over the America we believe in.

Who can forget that beatitude: Blessed are those who outnumber the others?

So last Friday Rapert got foiled by another dadgummed minority.

He proposed a resolution for the Legislative Council to lambaste Pulaski County Circuit Judge Chris Piazza. He was mad at the judge for giving marriage rights to gay people.

As you know, gay people are running especially roughshod lately. They are forcing heterosexuals to engage in lovemaking practices that they do not instinctively prefer. It's like one big prison shower out there.

Rapert wanted in this resolution to violate only a smidgen of the constitutional principle of separation of powers among the three branches of government.

He wanted the Legislature to resolve to encourage the Arkansas Supreme Court to overturn Piazza.

He won a majority of votes, 26-11. But state Rep. John Edwards of Little Rock, the co-chairman--and a Democrat, thus a dadgummed minority--ruled that, since the resolution wasn't on the agenda, a two-thirds vote of both the House and Senate memberships was required to consider it.

Edwards explained that the senators on the committee voted only 8-to-6 for the resolution, which was not two-thirds.

It was procedural trickery, which is prohibited by one or another of the Ten Commandments.

So Rapert took to Twitter and posted that only 3 percent of Americans claim to be gay and that the 3 percent must be stopped from dictating lifestyles to the 97 percent.

That includes, as he explained, the 75 percent of Arkansas voters who passed that amendment favoring God's law, which is, as you know, that Adam took a shine to Eve, not Steve.

I will admit to having been unaware previously that gay people were dictating my lifestyle. In fact, even now, amid this pervasive gay dictation of which Brother Rapert speaks, I am unable to think of anything gay people have done to my life other than enrich it.

But then I am, after all, a minority--on this page and elsewhere--and I'm always trying to run roughshod over y'all.

I'm running all roughshod over you right now. I'm typing your majority rights away at a rate of about a hundred words a minute.

As Brother Rapert would have me put it: My values is not your values and I have went too far in my writings.

"Stone him," as a man once shouted from the audience when I was speaking to the Springdale Rotary Club.

Finally, remember that this is primary day and that you should vote.

Then be sure to check the returns tonight so that you may determine the identities of the losers. They're the ones to fear.

They're the ones who'll run roughshod.

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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 05/20/2014

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