Folks, it’s serious

LITTLE ROCK — State Sen. Jason Rapert of Bigelow preaches with a revivalist’s cant.

He can nearly cry from his own presumed earnestness. He espouses a passionate, superficial and extreme conservatism. He panders to the Tea Party grandstand.

He plays “Just As I Am” on his fiddle at the Capitol, presumably to try to get liberals to repent.

All of that is why I have described him as resembling the offspring of Jimmy Swaggart and Ricky Skaggs.

So now Rapert-ordained evangelical minister, financial adviser, salesman, gospel guitarist and politician-is getting national attention. It’s the kind that backwoods demagogues sometimes get when people up north become aware of rural bumpkins making primitive policy in the hinterlands.

Rapert is the chief sponsor of that blatantly unconstitutional and woman-oppressing bill breezing through this tragic legislative session to presume to outlaw within our state any and all federally legal abortions.

This bill would require that women seeking entirely legal early pregnancy abortions get penetrated by a device to determine if a heartbeat can be detected in the fetus.

If detected, the doctor would go to jail if he performed the federally legal abortion.

Heartbeat detection could happen after a few weeks of pregnancy, though case law plainly permits abortions until “viability” after 22 to 23 weeks.

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Horrified women were talking on social media last week about organizing a protest march. I suggested that a march would be effective only if it proceeded all the way to a blue state.

Arkansas is “Oklabama” now, and Jason Rapert is the reincarnation of Paul Van Dalsem.

Because this bill is in the national vanguard of unconstitutionality and disdain for women, dismissing women as mere reproductive depositories in a male-domineering way exceeding anything even Oklahoma or Alabama or Mississippi has yet managed, Rapert has popped up on the national media’s radar screen.

The Nation-yes, the quintessential liberal publication-posted online a video it found on the Internet of Rapert talking some of his country pulpit jive to a Tea Party rally in Arkansas in 2011.

“Folks, it’s serious,” the ever-ingratiating Rapert began, which was the last true thing he said.

Rapert criticized President Barack Obama for inviting Muslims to the White House for a Ramadan observance and then not finding time to attend the National Prayer Breakfast.

Then he bellowed: “I hear you loud and clear, Barack Obama. You don’t represent the country that I grew up with. And your values is not going to save us. We’re going to take this country back for the Lord. We’re going to take this country back for conservatism. And we’re not going to allow minorities to run roughshod over what you people believe in.”

First, as to Rapert’s assertion that Obama’s “values is not going to save us,” I disagree, as do Rapert’s subject and verb.

Rapert has argued-correctly, I am certain-that he was not making a racial reference by referring to “minorities.” He was talking about previously invoked “minority” liberal views.

His direct bigotry in the statement was instead religious, against Muslims.

One of the two basic flaws of Rapert’s raging nonsense was that he declared war on freedom of religion, advocating a conservative theocracy and a tyranny of the majority.

The other basic flaw? That was a simple matter of fact.

New York magazine took note of Rapert and the video and offered a blog post following up The Nation’s. The magazine demonstrated with repeated photographic evidence that Obama had in fact attended every National Prayer Breakfast since 2009. It similarly showed that the George W. Bush administration held annual Ramadan dinners in the White House.

Typical of extreme right-wing blowhards, Rapert laid a totally fabricated foundation and then built elaborate hatefulness upon it.

How does a man like that get elected? Alas, he does it by saying the things people want to hear.

Here’s the open secret: This blowhard and showboat is more popular now than when elected last year. He is fast inventing himself as God’s martyr against baby-killing evil.

Rapert gets plenty of big money to help him say things people want to hear. His bountiful campaign coffers were filled last year by such interests as the Stephens Group, a Walton or two, Southwestern Energy Co. and AT&T.

Meanwhile, I repeat my distress, ever-deepening, that Gov. Mike Beebe has made Rapert the chief Senate sponsor of his popular and populist bill to draw down the grocery tax.

Rather than lead our brave resistance to “Oklabama,” Beebe allies with it.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.