OPINION

OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: The conservative thing


State Sen. Bart Hester, the president pro tem and a disarmingly simplistic ideologue lacking any sense of irony, explains that Republicans had no choice but to fill the law books with the culture war in the just-completed legislative session.

He said all those culture-war bills got enacted only because the liberal side wants to dictate its culture to him and other right-wingers rather than join him and them in joyous mutual tolerance.

The cultural right didn't want to oppress, you see. It had no choice.

Quite probably believing that he truly believed what he said he believed, Hester reviewed the session by telling this newspaper, "There was a lot of focus on the culture war because we are living in a culture war. We believe in Arkansas 100 percent of people are equal regardless of your gender, regardless of your beliefs about sexuality. The problem is we push back when someone that believes differently than us says we should believe like they believe. I am comfortable with someone else disagreeing with me. The problem is they are not comfortable with me disagreeing with them."

Alas, I fear bassackwardness reared its ugly posterior.

The key flaw among many in Hester's comment is that, if he declared as Barb Hester and walked into a women's restroom, the cultural left wouldn't make a law against her.

Still, bless all those tender right-wing hearts, bleeding as they are for equality of beliefs for everybody--meaning those like Hester who are equal enough to make the laws as well as those who disagree with him and are equal enough to have their freedom forbidden by the laws that he and his ilk make based on what they believe.

There is the equality granted a woman who has every right under the laws made by Hester and the rest of the cultural right to get raped or victimized by incest so that she might become impregnated and get commanded by the tolerant laws of Hester and the cultural right to carry the result to birth.

Hester apparently believes we need laws against a woman's right to choose abortion in those cases or any others because of the intolerant audacity of some women who want to force on him and his side that there be no law denying their right to choose.

He says essentially that the cultural right has no choice but to dictate against the cultural left's attempts to dictate that nothing gets dictated.

Then there is the equality granted transgender persons to risk arrest if unwisely traveling through Arkansas and entering a freeway super-stop restroom that Hester and the cultural right have no choice but to shut off to them, based on these principles of equality and tolerance.

The whole thing holds the cultural right hostage, presumably. Apparently word has gone out in Arkansas: Change your gender or else. Apparently it is imperative in the face of such rampaging gender-bending that the right wing defend the oppressed who just want to go with the parts they have.

Hester and the cultural right say these intolerant transgender persons pose a threat to Arkansas children by going into public restrooms not matching their personal parts and either gawking at little girls or showing themselves to little girls or little boys.

Indeed that would be bad. I would not have us tolerate that. But I haven't heard of it happening much or at all.

If it has happened, then somebody needs to round up all witnesses and tell the sheriff or the police because there are long-existing laws--not new contrivances of the culture war, but old ones on simple decency--against voyeurism and exhibitionism.

If the cultural right would worry more about bad actions than about people who are different, it would find existing law sufficient.

And, by the way, presumably it is tolerance and a dedication to equality by which Hester and the cultural right had no choice but to tell librarians in a new law that they are no longer exempt from obscenity penalties. The cultural right presumably had no choice but to dictate to librarians that they put books and materials that the cultural right doesn't like in a special place where people will not see them and face temptation to read them or risk an opportunity to learn by doing so.

We must be tolerant enough to keep people equal in what they can't read.

It once was widely held that conservatives stood for a good lettin' alone by a small and limited government and that liberals stood for imposing their nanny-state beliefs on everyone else through a large and activist government. It's the opposite now.

Bart Hester is the lead nanny. His Arkansas takes tolerance so seriously that it insists on it by statutes declaring that the state does not tolerate the absence of its version.

Someday maybe we can make fewer laws. Someday maybe that will be the conservative thing again.


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.


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