For several hours Wednesday, and overnight until Thursday morning, it appeared Arkansas might not get any Itzhak Perlman performances or Bruce Springsteen concerts.
Actually, we weren't in line to get either. The outcry for those particular artists was not especially pronounced. We're a state more interested in a Gaither gospel fest or a gun show, neither ever threatened.
I'm just trying to crack wise about this bathroom craziness.
You will recall that Springsteen pulled out of a concert in North Carolina because of the state's passage of a law that exempted gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender persons from discrimination protection; barred transgender persons' entry into public bathrooms of their gender identity; and prohibited cities or counties within the state from choosing by local control to provide otherwise.
Last week Perlman canceled a performance in North Carolina after the local nonprofit symphony support group for which he was scheduled to appear wouldn't let him put a statement protesting the law in the program.
So here was the 18-hour drama in Arkansas as it unfolded in the hours preceding the opening of the special legislative session called by Gov. Asa Hutchinson on highway funding and a few other odd and utterly nonessential items:
The Republican Senate caucus had a private planning meeting Wednesday. Somebody emerged to tell somebody who then told me that Sen. Missy Irvin of Mountain View, who always seems to be mixed up in some kind of drama, had announced that she was going to put in a bathroom bill.
The governor controls the agenda for a special session unless something gets added by a two-thirds vote.
"You think they couldn't get two-thirds?" a well-placed source said with an inflection assuring that of course they could.
Who in this Arkansas General Assembly, other than an occasional member from Fayetteville or Little Rock, would dare vote to let a transgender person go into a bathroom with a little girl?
The situation seems to be that conservative Southern Republicans, who have overrun Arkansas, believe the world is getting too weird.
They think a pastor sexually abusing a child is a personal problem, subject to forgiveness, but that a person with male parts presenting as a female for public bathroom entry--based on a self-identification the experts say is real--is the end of all decency and reason.
The governor's office was highly displeased, not because the governor wants transgender persons to have rights, which he doesn't, but because he wanted a short and sweet session not derailed by the national spectacle of a live bathroom debate down here in our little neck of the backwoods.
It's one thing to decry the Obama administration's "over-reach" in telling states they ought to grant bathroom entry to transgender persons. And Hutchinson did that. But it's another to pass an actual law that causes people and businesses to boycott your state.
What the governor's office wanted was no bill and to buy time until the January regular session to try to finesse a way to discriminate but not run off any modern economic prospects.
Irvin wouldn't return my messages until late in the day when she texted to say she'd be happy to talk about some nobler measure she was sponsoring.
Then the Arkansas Times blog reported that Irvin wasn't preparing to propose a bill requiring a two-thirds vote for consideration, but, instead, an amendment to a bill about juveniles and sexual abuse. And that amendment, the Times blog said, would make it a sex crime to be possessed of one set of parts and to enter a bathroom labeled in a way conventionally suggesting use by another set of parts.
Surely there would have been an exception for a case like mine a few months ago. I saw a very good movie. As I exited the theater and realized I needed to visit the restroom, I walked foggily therein, my mind lost in the images and themes of very recently engrossing cinema, only to meet a surprised-looking woman coming out of a stall.
I think it was Spotlight. The movie, I mean. It was either about transgender persons as sexual abusers or priests as sexual abusers. I forget.
Such an amendment arguably would have been more draconian than North Carolina's law, which was about discrimination, not criminalization.
In the end Irvin didn't go through with any of that, largely because the governor and others talked her out of it.
Then, for a few hours, until the next morning, actually, there was a possibility that someone in the House would grab the issue. But the governor's office and its allies talked down those folks as well.
Later Thursday, Hutchinson told reporters a bathroom bill is most likely coming in the regular session next year.
There's no basis for thinking that will turn out well for a state that, at least, is used to suffering.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 05/22/2016