Commentary

JOHN BRUMMETT: Headed to the bathroom

Today's column provides troubling news for transgender persons in Arkansas and Gov. Asa Hutchinson.

For transgender persons, the problem is that a law presuming to discriminate explicitly against them is near-certain next year.

For the governor, the problem is that, his own personal cultural conservatism aside, it's hard to sell Arkansas as a modern economic mecca when the Legislature is running around yelling "yabba dabba do."

State Rep. Bob Ballinger of Hindsville told me I was mistaken to say that he would sponsor a transgender-restrictive "bathroom bill" in the regular session next year.

He said someone else is likelier to be chief sponsor of the legislation, which, he advised, is "going to happen." And he said he knew nothing of any "bathroom bill." He said he and others were working instead on legislation "handling privacy in facilities in state-owned property."

That's a "bathroom bill," in the common nomen-clature.

The law in North Carolina that caused major groups to boycott that state banned in state facilities any bathroom usage by persons identifying as the gender of the bathroom they were entering while possessed anatomically of different private parts.

Enforcement? There is none. North Carolina has not established any bathroom-door police to hand-check the private parts of persons needing, perhaps urgently, to relieve themselves.

Penalties? There aren't any. The purpose of the North Carolina law was not to throw anyone in jail, but to let conservatives stand up for the Lord against supposed perverts. Don't you see?

Ditto now for Arkansas in 2017.

Call it what you want, but what Ballinger describes sounds enough like the stunt North Carolina pulled to hold the potential to take national heat off that state.

That's doubly the case considering that Arkansas already sports, quite separately, a law equivalent to the second offending section of North Carolina's. It is a provision saying local governments, even if they wanted, could not exercise local control to adopt ordinances banning discrimination against gays and lesbians and transgender persons.

Arkansas might escape the national backlash sustained by North Carolina, which has lost, among other things, an NBA all-star game, seven NCAA championship events and a big PayPal expansion.

That's because Arkansas wasn't getting any of that, or anything akin to it, in the first place.

Our Chinese pulp mill, annual Taekwondo costume party and Gaither Family concert perhaps would survive.

Nonetheless, the governor does not want this bill. "I have met with Rep. Ballinger and others that are concerned about this issue, and I'll continue to work with them to evaluate what is needed in our state," Hutchinson said in a written statement. "However, with the current court cases pending that will likely strike down any guidance from the Obama Administration and with the fact that there is already local flexibility in place to handle these sensitive issues, I do not see any need for any legislation in Arkansas at this time."

Ballinger told me there have been discussions about this looming matter with Hutchinson's office in which concerns were expressed about the "distraction" and "disruption" of such a bill. But he said the discussions did not affect whether a bill will be filed, because one surely will.

He and his allies have no choice, Ballinger said.

Why? He replied that a young girl might walk into a shower in a state park and behold a shower-taker of male body parts. "It's a problem we never thought in a hundred years we'd have to address," Ballinger said.

So what's the sudden problem? Has the aforementioned confrontation happened? At which state park?

Not as far as he knows, Ballinger replied, although he had heard something about a state college that tried to make roommates of a student with female parts and another of female identification but without female parts. I have no further details on that, and the one state college I checked with, based on what Ballinger said he'd heard, denied it.

The problem, Ballinger said, is that such a confrontation is bound to happen now that the evil Obama administration has forced the issue.

We have laws against indecent exposure, as we should. But a transgender person going into a bathroom of the gender with which the transgender person identifies is not a matter of exposing oneself but of being oneself.

Liberals say there wasn't any problem until conservatives started making laws to discriminate. Conservatives say the problem is liberals making laws to ban basic godliness and decency.

Liberals are right about who started the fight. But that matters not a whit in this Arkansas General Assembly, where such a bill will pass moments after filing.

I asked Ballinger about enforcement and penalty. He said he tended to think a law declaring a policy would be enough.

Quite enough, indeed, if, that is, you oppose setting back a state not fully recovered from its last embrace of discrimination.

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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 10/06/2016

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