A hate-crimes bill, beyond posing a moral question, presents great peril for the state in the legislative session beginning in January.
The newly strengthened right wing of our General Assembly could send a national signal of backward gay-hate that could harm the state's best efforts to modernize its economy and grow.
Just to be mercenary about it, beyond the basic humanity of the issue: It is fair to say that a place that resists diversity and inclusiveness and manages to wind up condoning gay hatred will not position itself well for outside investment in the changing world.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson believes Arkansas should no longer be among three states without a law allowing supplemental punishment for persons whose crimes against others can be shown to be based on hate of those others because of their skin color or ethnicity or religion or sexual orientation or gender identity, among other factors.
His nephew, Sen. Jim Hendren, has joined Democratic legislators and some Republicans in advancing a bill to prescribe those supplemental punishments.
The most ideologically right-wing of state senators--Trent Garner, Bob Ballinger, Gary Stubblefield, Alan Clark, et al.--have stacked themselves on the Senate Judiciary Committee to beat the bill or at least amend sexual orientation and gender identity out of it.
Sen. Jimmie Hickey, the incoming president pro-tempore, told me last week he simply doesn't understand the reasoning for such a measure. He said he thought minority groups wanted equality, not special protection. He said the bill "faces a very steep climb" in the Senate.
The Republican State Committee is said to stand on the precipice of passing a resolution opposing the bill.
So, here's your situation: This is a good-faith effort by Hutchinson, Hendren and bipartisan partners to have Arkansas join the modern world on diversity championing and hate resistance. But good deeds sometimes don't go unpunished. Having a Senate committee specifically condone gay hate by amending sexual orientation and gender identity out of the bill as protected classes could lead to national publicity and send a signal to modern industries that Arkansas is no place to go.
Conservative ideologues scoff at what they consider blackmail. They cling tighter than ever to their belief that homosexuality and gender identity are sinful choices undeserving of the protections extended to the no-choice circumstances of skin color and ethnicity.
And when a left-leaning pragmatist suggested on social media last week that the state might be better off just skipping the destructive fight, he--by whom I mean I--got called down vigorously.
"It's not going to be pulled," Hendren replied.
Hendren told me I might be right that the state would be harmed by a Senate committee's removing protections for gays from the bill. But he said the state would risk similar harm to its reputation and economic prospects by cowering against that possibility and abandoning the bill.
Later that day, Hutchinson told me that pulling bills down pre-emptively for fear of the bad national signal of losing would have kept him from trying twice and finally succeeding in getting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday celebrated on its own, disconnected from the absurdity of joint celebration of the Confederacy.
He said he was optimistic, which he of course would say. But he did suggest that advocates for the bill might build momentum on the House side, where nine of 20 Judiciary Committee members are Democrats probably supportive of the bill. Then, surely, the governor could get a couple of Republicans to vote with him.
That would isolate the ever-rightward Senate in know-nothingism, with which the Senate might prove fine.
Hickey's position that he simply doesn't understand the need--his thinking that minorities want to be equal, not special--is potentially susceptible to reason.
The point of hate-crimes laws as applied in 47 states is to seek leverage not so much to protect specially the enumerated victim classes as to punish specially persons whose crimes can be proven by evidence not to be matters of momentary passion or individual meanness or man-to-revenge, but of pervasive hate of innocent people simply because of their difference.
The people most vulnerable to hate-based discrimination and physical threat probably are those presenting themselves publicly as the gender different from what the haters believe their gender formerly was.
There is just something about that that sets the violence-prone thugs off.
A hate-crimes bill doesn't ask anyone to give special rights to a transgender person. It asks all of us to show the decency to send a message to criminal bullies that we don't tolerate their inhumanity.
And if that message helps define Arkansas as a good place to do business, as it would, then all the better.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.