Life in the echo chamber

“Come get my gun if you wish. But don’t dare try to take my slave.”- Thomas Jefferson.

So are you saying there’s no evidence Mr. Jefferson ever said such a thing? Then I say there’s no evidence he didn’t. And ol’ TJ himself has discontinued active human communication.

Here’s the deal: I made it up. What are you going to do about it?

Let me explain something before I get too far into this essential diatribe: I’m being sarcastic. I’m making deserved and important fun of the right-wing zealots and know-nothings who have taken over the Arkansas Legislature and begun our state’s counter-evolutionary plunge into retro-Third Worldism.

The other morning I took it upon myself to eviscerate on social media an assertion from the emerging conservative eminence that is state Rep. Bob Ballinger of Hindsville. A lawyer and evangelical, Ballinger is the champion of that idea to have Arkansas pass a law saying it will not obey-thus break-any new federal gun laws. That kind of disobedience worked so well for us, after all, on school integration.

I saw that Ballinger had made the following post on Twitter: “Remember ‘The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it.’- Thomas Jefferson.”

That didn’t sound like Jefferson to me. So I checked. Then I replied to Ballinger to encourage him to link monticello.org, the website of the Jefferson Foundation. Scholars on that site have put the aforementioned comment under their “spurious quotations” heading. They said their research had found no evidence of Jefferson’s ever saying or writing such a thing. They said the first appearance of this supposed quote came in 2007. Jefferson was 264 at the time.

Ballinger replied to laugh off the apparent bogusness of what he’d done. He joked that he got the comment from the Internet, so it had to be so.

Then state Rep. Andy Davis of Little Rock, trolling Republican,came to Ballinger’s aid to tweet that the quote was so good that, even if Jefferson maybe didn’t actually utter it, Ballinger should take it as his own.

So there you have it-fact, honesty, seriousness, credibility and political eloquence, Arkansas-style, 2013.

What all this evokes is the modern right-wing echo chamber, which I’ve seen aptly defined as “a situation in which information, ideas or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission inside an ‘enclosed’ space.”

To support whatever these right-wingers choose to espouse, they invariably rely on some supposed validation-a quotation, perhaps, which, actually, might be no quotation at all, until, that is, the echo chamber circulates it into a life of its own.

Here’s the greater relevance: From their recycled inaccuracies, these people now set public policy in Arkansas.

None of that is to suggest that nonsensical right-wing political communication is limited to modern social media. There was some Thursday in the old reliable newspaper. It came in a quote from state Rep. Ann Clemmer, Republican from Benton who teaches political science at UALR, but who co-sponsored Sen. Jason Rapert’s 12-week abortion ban anyway.

She explained her thinking: “Arkansas law, since 1999, has said that babies 12 weeks in utero are a person. To acknowledge that and still acknowledge that it’s OK to eliminate persons… it just hit me.”

Clemmer is referring to a law penalizing violence against a pregnant woman that said, for purposes of that law, a fetus at 12 weeks would be considered a person.

In other words, making a federally dubious statement in Arkansas law in 1999 authorizes Arkansas to make the same federally dubious statement again in Arkansas law in 2013. Talk about an echo chamber: You shout something in 1999 and accept it as truth in 2013 only because the noise resounded.

At least she didn’t attribute it to Thomas Jefferson.

Clemmer got back to me later to cite an Arkansas Supreme Court ruling that an unborn child could be treated as a person for purposes of a medical-malpractice suit. But that was a doctor’s competence issue from the delivery room, not a 12-week life issue from the uterus.

Meantime, on the morning after the override of Gov. Mike Beebe’s veto of the Rapert-Clemmer assault on women, an Idaho law banning abortions after 20 weeks-eight weeks later than the Rapert-Clemmer bill-was declared unconstitutional by a federal judge.

Clemmer dismissed that ruling as the inconsequential work of a judge in a known liberal circuit.

But she did tell me something else that I found worthy of putting on the record: Federal case law evolves; someday, she predicted, we’re probably going to look back in amazement that we ever had laws forbidding same sex marriages and permitting killing of babies.

Finally, the abortion issue is all about when life begins. I’ve always celebrated mine as beginning on my birthday. If you’re telling me I need to celebrate it on the day of conception,then I’m going to need to ask my mother some awkward questions.

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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.