I'm fired up about good dialogue, having enjoyed a bit of it last week. I engaged in potentially valuable exchanges that took place after columns in this space on:
• The grandstanding of conservative state legislators who rush to pass culture-war bills to ban practices that don't much exist in the state but that the conservative legislators say are coming unless we have prophylactic laws.
• The gist of so-called critical race theory and whether it's indoctrination in anti-Americanism or valuable advanced-level education worthy of a great country trying to be a better country.
Responses to those columns ranged from full agreement about legislative posturing and systemic racism to a letter to the editor that foresaw trouble for me on Judgment Day when facing my creator, identified in the letter as a conservative Republican who supports Sarah Sanders.
Grateful to have survived hellfire this far, I thought I'd present a composite of recent conversations I've had with three different people on transgender girls entering track meets and swim meets to compete--presumably with advantages of size, speed and strength--against birth-certificate girls.
This is how those conversations pretty much went when rolled into one:
"John, I get some of what you're saying about a lot of these bills amounting to pure political posturing in that they presume to solve nonexistent problems. But, I must tell you, I can't help but struggle with this idea of boys declaring as girls and then competing with girls in athletics. It just doesn't seem right to me. I just can't stop thinking with some certainty that we shouldn't permit it. What do you say about that?"
"I say, man, I have the same struggle. I can't work it out in my head so I try not to think about it at all. It's going to go one way or the other eventually regardless of my or your angst."
"But isn't that a cop-out? I mean, this is a moral issue. And don't we have moral obligation to fight for our daughters if they get treated unfairly by transgender competition?"
"Actually, I prefer the way you defined it the second time, not as a moral but a fairness issue. That means it's a justice issue. And where do we settle justice issues? In court, not the Legislature."
"You can call it what you want, but I call it a moral issue because that's what it is. I don't know why you avoid calling it what it is."
"I don't avoid it. I say it's, first, while a moral issue, more reconcilable as a justice issue. They say you can't legislate morality. That's not what legislatures are for. But we can certainly decide what is just. That's exactly what courts are for."
"I'm still not following. I think you're just being evasive because, by your own admission, you don't want to deal with it--because, I suspect, you know the standard progressive position is wrong."
"So let me try to be clear. Yes, I'm being evasive. Yes, I want to avoid the issue. A person must ration his worries these days. But I am confident in the solution I lay out, even if woven out of evasion. It is that, first, the issue should be dealt with by the relevant regulatory body--the NCAA, the Arkansas Activities Association, whoever. The association should make a rule on eligibility and enforce it. Yes, someone is going to be aggrieved in terms of perceived injustice by such a rule--either the transgender girl wanting to compete or the birth-certificate girl who doesn't want to get beat by a former male. And what does an aggrieved party do in America? It sues. And the courts decide. Notice, then, whom I've left out in terms of roles in this controversy?"
"The Legislature."
"Yes. My point is that, if legislative politicians presume to make a statute on the subject, their action is going to be passed on by an inevitable lawsuit to the courts anyway. Legislative politicians will have injected themselves needlessly. And why would they do that? It would not be to solve the problem, because it's not theirs to solve. It would be to grandstand. It would be to appease the political base with a popular message that appears to reveal the legislators as responsive to constituents and ready to cut these perversions off at the knees."
"Is that also you how feel about the abortion issue--just default on that moral issue, which surely you'll admit abortion is, to the judges and leave the legislators out?"
"It's how I feel and it's what we did. The Supreme Court established the abortion-rights law of the land and the Supreme Court repealed it, at which point the judiciary sent the issue back to the states, at which point--and only at that point--it became a state legislative issue."
"And I guess you're happy with what the Supreme Court ruled on abortion this last time."
"No, I deplore it. Just as I deplored the Citizens United ruling that embraced unregulated political spending. But there's nothing I can do about either of those, just as there's nothing I can do about the transgender sports issue."
"Hmmmm."
"Yes, hmmmm. You summed it up perfectly right there. We need more people who say 'hmmmm,' especially at the state Capitol."
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.