It is our Southern heritage, passed from the Civil War through the civil-rights movement to the current moment in Alabama and Arkansas.
We instinctively oppose equal rights for people who are different and in the minority. We instinctively resist federal constitutional law when it presumes to grant such rights.
We had slaves in the mid-1800s and we didn't give them up without a fight. We had racial segregation in the mid-1900s and we didn't give it up without a fight.
Now we have to deal with un-closeted gay people. And we as a region remain the same. We don't like 'em. We don't want 'em being equal.
Our Arkansas Legislature has gone to the extraordinary length of denying cities the right to make ordinances protecting gay people from discrimination. A legislator prevailed with the argument that a baker shouldn't be forced to make a cake for people he doesn't approve of.
It's unlikely any local ordinance would seek to compel a baker in such a way. But the Arkansas sensibility is made clear by the example: Gay people we don't like should not be protected from discrimination because it might affect some discriminator we like.
Gay people ought to be easier for us to oblige. Their rights don't affect or inconvenience anyone else's.
Slaves were key to the regional economy. Integration affected the children of the majority white people.
Gay people want only to marry each other. They don't want to marry you.
They don't want your job. They want only to keep the one they already have as long as they perform it competently.
But still there is Alabama. And still there is Alabama's chief judge of the state Supreme Court, a man wholly unreconstructed from the 1950s and '60s, a Faubusian Wallacite, a Ross Barnett, a Justice Jim.
His name is Roy Moore.
A federal district judge declared unconstitutional the Alabama law against same-sex marriage. Judges are doing that everywhere on account of equal protection under federal constitutional law.
So Moore hauled off and made a statement as chief justice that county officials in Alabama shouldn't obey the federal court. He said state law was different and, anyway, the federal court ruling affected only the one county that got sued, not all Alabama counties.
Moore had no case before him. He had no context for saying what he said.
He simply made himself grand poobah of Alabama.
Then the U.S. Supreme Court declined to grant a stay of the district court ruling, leaving it as general law within the federal district, not simply one county's law.
By Moore's reasoning, Brown v. Board of Education affected only the schools in Topeka; Roe v. Wade affected only one abortion; Citizens United affected only one anti-Hillary Clinton documentary.
We can't have a country--or a federal court district--in which Jane Roe has a constitutional right that Jane Doe doesn't, simply because Roe went to court and Doe didn't. We live by general constitutional principles and the equal blanketed application of the rule of law.
Except, again, in Alabama, where now the entire state Supreme Court has voted 6-to-2 to accept briefs on whether the state could tell local officials not to obey the federal court ruling.
And except, as well, for our Arkansas Supreme Court, where an appeal on gay marriage is over-ripe. The court majority apparently is fearful of political damage from what it will have to rule--since justices regrettably stand for election in Arkansas and there is a looming vacancy for chief justice.
I refer to Courtney Goodson and the Supremes.
Justice Goodson wants to run for chief justice next time despite conflicts of interest owing to her husband's fame as the state's leading, and politically wired, class-action attorney. The Supremes are her backup singers--Justices Jo Hart, Karen Baker and Rhonda Wood.
The state Supreme Court held its conference and presumably decided in October what to do about the appeal before it of Circuit Judge Chris Piazza's declaration that the state's ban of same-sex marriage is unconstitutional.
But the court didn't issue a ruling as expected before the end of the year, after which two new justices--one of them the aforementioned Wood--joined the court. That provided an occasion permitting Justice Goodson and the Supremes to buy time by inviting new arguments from both sides on whether the newly constituted court ought to rehear the appeal altogether from the start.
Meantime, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide the matter in a case to be heard in April and probably ruled on in June.
All signs are that all state bans on same-sex marriage will be stricken.
But that doesn't mean we'll necessarily go along in Arkansas. Like Alabama, our role model, we could invite briefs from lawyers on the question we're keeping open: Which side won the Civil War?
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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 02/17/2015