COMMENTARY

Rapert’s revolution

State Sen. Jason Rapert, who lives in Bigelow and works in Conway, is mad.

By that I mean angry. Not, well, you know.

I deem that I need to get this matter on the record. That’s because I see a reasonable possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court could rule 5-to-4 this month that states may not deny same-sex marriages, owing to the U.S. Constitution and all. In that case, I have an idea that Rapert is going to lead a revolution against his decadent nation.

He is mad as the dickens about all these rights being given to people who disagree with his religious thinking. And he simply is not going to put up with it.

Just the other day Rapert crowed on social media that he’d gone by the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington and publicly prayed for the nine justices to issue a gay-discriminatory ruling.

Maybe someone else prayed privately at home for fairness.

Rapert might merely have been warming up Saturday night when—his sermon preparations for Sunday morning perhaps done—he took to Facebook to write that gay people should not be allowed to have a pride parade in Conway on a Sunday because of his religious views.

He essentially said as follows, by my sound paraphrase for clarity and to save space: I say being gay is a sin. I say Sunday is my day because I’m a real Christian. So I say city government should not allow these sinners to have a permit to exercise their constitutional rights to assemble and express themselves on my day, and to my offense. This is my town. Mine and the Lord’s. We set the rules around here. Well, the Lord does, through me. Trust me on that. And if y’all don’t stop being a Sodom and Gomorrah, y’all are going to parade your gay and gay-sympathizing selves straight to the fiery furnaces of hell.

As it happens, the 12th annual such parade was to take place beginning at 1 p.m. the next day. That would be by expressed permit of a city government Rapert finds heathen because it obliges people he deems godless sinners on account of their romantic and sexual orientation.

Rapert wrote on Facebook that these gay people were holding their parade on Sunday to mock and intimidate real Christians such as himself.

When a generally supportive commenter on Rapert’s Facebook rant suggested the senator had best be careful in suggesting that government could deny the constitutional right to assemble on Sunday—because, you know, one thing might lead to another—Rapert explained that he did not object to the right to assemble. He said he objected only to the right of these sinners to move about once assembled—to parade in celebration of their sin by expressed grant of a formal permit from a city government that could have denied such a permit at least on the Lord’s Day.

And been sued, and lost, I figure.

I think every day is the Lord’s Day. I think we do a lot of things on Sundays anymore. I think the Constitution expressly prohibits a grandstanding politician from seeking to rule theocratically by assertion of holding God’s real and true sanction. I think the parade started at 1 p.m. Well, I know that much. And I think Rapert and his real Christians were home saying grace over the pot roast by then, free from mocking or intimidation.

Two more related matters and then we’ll put this aside while we await the big Supreme Court ruling and the looming Rapert Revolution of 2015:

One is that Rapert’s Facebook tirade repeats his frequent assertion that 96.2 percent of Americans should not be forced to “affirm the confusion of 3.8 percent” who are gay.

Let’s not quibble for these purposes over his percentages or his assertion of gayness as confusion. Let’s merely take note that he is saying a minority should be denied rights and equality by virtue of its being a very small minority.

Rapert has not spoken publicly as yet on the size a minority must achieve in order to have rights under the Constitution.

The second is that Rapert took out personally after Conway Mayor Tab Townsell, who, in turn, went on Facebook himself to say he’d recently transferred his personal 457 public-employee retirement fund from Rapert’s management to an alternative manager, and to suggest that Rapert simply has a problem with alternatives.

The mayor tells me he was jesting and seeking to be clever. He said Rapert, who handles money for people in addition to handling their religion and their constitutional rights, had performed competently as a management alternative for the city of Conway’s public retirement program. He said Rapert had accepted his personal change of administrator with professional courtesy.

That’s the thing about Rapert: He’s not incompetent. He’s just mad.

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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