COMMENTARY

A statement of abdication

We’re getting a bit of bad law out of this Legislature. It’s happening because responsible Republicans are afraid of irresponsible ones. Democrats are irrelevant.

It’s not Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s fault, and it is.

So far the worst law of this session is the one Hutchinson allowed into statutory status Monday without his signature. It says local governments may not enact ordinances to prohibit discrimination.

It provides that state government reserves the right to preserve and protect discrimination so that discrimination won’t be unequally applied in the state.

We don’t want to discriminate in our discrimination, you see.

By this new law’s unstated but obvious intent, the discrimination is against gays. But by the actual wording of the statute, the reality is vastly more general.

The law proclaims that no city in Arkansas may prohibit by ordinance any discrimination against any “protected class” not specifically protected already by state law.

Hutchinson opposed this blatant absurdity too much to sign it. It’s probably all right with him to discriminate against the gays specifically, because they’re gay and he went to Bob Jones University. Still, this bill offended him.

But he lacked the nerve or will to go to the mat to beat the bill in the first place. So now he has made some kind of statement by not signing it, but not vetoing it either.

A muted statement. A pointless statement. A statement of abdication.

He’s not the first governor to speak softly and carry not even a little stick.

A complication is that our horrible state Constitution permits a governor’s veto to be overridden by the same simple majority by which bills are passed. Our Constitution of 1874 fears consolidated authority.

The bill came from Sen. Bart Hester of Cave Springs, an amiable former Razorback baseball player who is a Koch brothers’ agent. He owes his election to the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity.

That Koch tentacle got behind Hester four years ago because the incumbent Republican in Benton County had supported giving the people the right to vote on whether they wanted to raise their own highway user taxes. Hester vowed to the Kochs never to vote to let people have a say like that in their own affairs.

Apparently the Kochs have a hangup with people deciding things on their own. Some things. Not all things. It depends on the thing.

By the way, the people voted overwhelmingly for higher highway taxes.

The point is that no reasonable Republican wants to tangle with the Kochs or their agents. It’s a good way to get yourself a primary opponent. And it’s not certain you would defeat that opponent. That poor guy whom Hester beat didn’t expect to lose for endorsing the people’s right to vote.

Oh, and by the way: Hester responded by email the other day to a mainstream Christian minister opposing his bill by wondering if she was going to hell.

I’m no big fan of local control. I oppose it, as does case law, in the matter of our public schools.

But the notion that the state would reserve the right to enforce discrimination evenly—on the supposed premise that the state shouldn’t allow discrimination to be stopped in one place but practiced in another, because that inconsistency would send a mixed signal to economic prospects … well, that surely is one of the more laughable whole-cloth creations ever emanating from a place somewhat noted over the decades for the occasional emanation of laughable concepts.

The opposite is so. This new law sends a global signal that Arkansas is behind the times and getting behinder. Wal-Mart said as much in a statement Monday.

Now that the deed is done, I’m hearing rumblings of misgivings by some of the more reasonable Republicans. I’m hearing that they kind of wish they’d amended the bill to say any anti-discrimination ordinance passed by a city council would be automatically referred to the voters, or something like that.

That would have been a nice little finesse preserving both local control and discrimination, except maybe in Eureka Springs.

Meantime, there is a companion bill that is perhaps even worse. It’s House Bill 1228 by Rep. Bob Ballinger of Hindsville. It would give citizens the right to disobey local laws if they cite a matter of conscience according to their religion.

That bill has passed the House and is pending in the Senate, where maybe—just maybe—responsible Republicans will find a trash can for it, or amend it into oblivion.

It basically lets anybody ignore any law by invoking a religious belief.

It would give Arkansas potentially 3 million individual theocracies.

For example: I was brought up in a fundamentalist Christian sect that does not permit musical instruments in worship services because there is no mention in the New Testament of the early Christians having pianos or organs, much less electric guitars.

I’ve long-since backslid out of that religion. But let’s pretend for these purposes that I went back, if only for purposes of avoiding a citation.

Let me tell you something else that’s not mentioned in the New Testament: parking meters.

That meter patrolman giving me a ticket for over-parking is doing Lucifer’s bidding. No government can make me pay for what the Lord hath not specifically sanctioned.

Silly? Sure. Very. But who among us will be made official arbiter of what is real religion and not, and what is silly and not? A Baptist or a Roman Catholic? An Episcopalian or a nondenominational evangelical rock ’n’ roller?

Bart Hester? Bob Ballinger? Asa Hutchinson? The Koch brothers?

Looks like somebody is going to have to do it.

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.

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