It's the highest drama at the state Capitol since Jim Guy Tucker un-resigned as governor for a few hours.
Will Arkansas pay no attention to the woes besetting Indiana? Will it also enact a law propping up religion as grounds for discriminating against gays and lesbians and transgender persons?
Poor old Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who had such great plans to bring jobs to the state, tried too late to get the bill amended Indiana-style to stipulate that it would not license discrimination in any way.
The governor had become concerned that--right or wrong--such a law would be perceived as discriminatory and could drive away economic prospects.
This realization had come to Hutchinson fatally late because, for all his planning and caution and pragmatism and savvy otherwise, he simply was unaware of the national power of a gay-rights movement that never looked all that muscular in Arkansas.
He has only himself to blame. Ten days ago he leaned on state Sen. David Burnett to change his vote to get this lightning rod of a bill out of committee. As recently as the weekend he was scoffing that businesses would eschew Arkansas for having such a law. He was oblivious to time and context.
But there's a world outside the state's border, and there are powerful homosexuals and progressive-minded people of economic prominence in it, and Arkansas must interact with those people, although now the more progressive elements won't wish to interact with us.
State Rep. Bob Ballinger of Hindsville, who is Jason Rapert without the charm, said his bill did not condone discrimination, but that he would not consent to allow an amendment to be put on the bill to say in law what he just said orally.
Let me put that another way, a crystal-clear way: Ballinger refused to allow his bill to be amended to say it isn't discriminatory. Which means--obviously--that it is.
And let me tell you why Ballinger and his cohorts didn't want such an amendment: It presumably would say that the law does not permit discrimination against specific groups, one of which would be gays and lesbians expressly. And that, you see, would make homosexuals a "protected class" for the first time in Arkansas. Ballinger and his buddies would be getting the one thing they desperately oppose.
Ballinger and his pals believe that a group practicing what they believe to be perversion or immorality or behavioral choice should not be protected in law beside those protected by skin color and gender.
Whatever. We're going in a circle. Regardless of whether he and his pals approve of gays, and regardless of whether he thinks gays are what they are in the same way that a black man is a black man, his bill simply and undeniably will permit discrimination against homosexuals on the basis of the discriminator's assertion of religion.
And there are a lot of people around the country--powerful people--who do not approve of that kind of discrimination and who will now view Arkansas as unreconstructed from 1957.
I remember when I was a boy, a strange one. I'd study an atlas that, beyond the maps, listed Census data for all the cities and counties and states. And I remember wondering why my Arkansas was the only state to lose population from 1950 to 1960.
I now understand that it happened because we discriminated famously in that decade and people around the country eschewed us, and we lost business, and our people had to flee.
So now we've offended Silicon Valley and we've offended thousands of our own residents by discriminating against them even as we say we're not discriminating, but religious.
And we've offended Wal-Mart, which has called on the governor to veto this measure. Wal-Mart is a global marketer that does not need to be associated with a headquarters state that would pass such a law. As a man said to me the other day: Buy Target stock.
Our problem in Arkansas is a compounded one, burdened by any lack of subtlety. A few weeks before we passed this bill, we passed an utterly outrageous bill to say that our cities did not have the local authority to pass anti-gay-discrimination ordinances.
Our bigotry thus is transparent. We don't have a subtle bone in our bodies.
So now poor old Asa, reeling from an attack on his blind side, will try to emulate poor old Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. He'll try to get passed other legislative language to deny discrimination.
Failing that, it began to appear Wednesday that he might actually veto the bill. He is building the case.
At the moment his governorship has gotten away from him. It's his destructive right flank that has gotten away from him--Ballinger and Rapert and that ilk. This is what he gets the house and State Police salary for.
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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.
Editorial on 04/02/2015