Another crack in the wall

They are deep into religion at the legislative session. I mean deep in a piled-up way that is heavy on judgmental fundamentalism. I do not mean deep in a thoughtful way.

John Brummett is blogging daily online.

Arkansas has long been inclined toward a merger of the fundamentalists' church and our state.

We led the nation in 1981 in getting federal court rejection for seeking to mandate that Genesis get taught in public schools in balance with science. But this new Republican revolution seems to have opened floodgates.


We simply must start the discussion with state Sen. Bart Hester of Cave Springs. He was primary sponsor of that bill--now law--saying essentially that local governments may not ban job discrimination against homosexuals.

Yes, that's what the new law provides--that state government will not allow a city to make its own ordinance saying it must treat gay people fairly. The matter is getting national attention, since America has mostly been about a long arc toward justice, not a rapid plunge away from it.

It turns out that a liberal Presbyterian minister, Rev. Marie Mainard O'Connell, sent Hester an email saying she feared his legislation would effectively license people to treat others abusively.

He replied by going ... well, there, by which I mean the afterlife.

He asked her in a responding email: "As a reverend, if you died today, would you go to heaven or hell [and] why?"

It was nice of him to make clear what his pro-discrimination bill was based upon. Hellfire and brimstone, that is. His religious view, that is. Some lawyer might want to take note.

Mainard O'Connell took offense, particularly since she hadn't invoked religion directly in her missive. She shot back to school the baby-faced young Koch-backed senator from Benton County in more positive, less judgmental theological theories about heaven's prospect.

Heaven is available to any of us, she counseled Hester, only by "the grace, will and forgiveness of God."

So now it turns out that city officials in Conway have passed an anti-discrimination ordinance for city government employees that would protect gays. Hester's bill has become law without Gov. Asa Hutchinson's signature, but it lacks an emergency clause and therefore is not in effect for a while.

The Log Cabin Democrat in Conway asked the local evangelical pope--the preaching grandstander, Sen. Jason Rapert--what he thought about that city initiative. So Rapert issued a statement saying such an ordinance would be bad because it would force religious people to accept what they believe to be sin, and that, for good measure, it potentially could allow a man to claim he was a woman merely so he could go to the bathroom with women and girls.

Truth be known, no one is stopping a man right now from walking into a women's public restroom.

I know. I came out of a movie not too long ago entirely absorbed by what I'd just seen. I ambled into a toilet facility to encounter a surprised woman coming out of a stall. My first thought was what she was in the wrong place.

My second thought was that she was in the right place.

There were no charges against me, so far as I know. I fled.

To be more serious: The restroom gender issue always comes up and is much more a matter of alarmism than actual practice. But, yes, in some jurisdictions, a person anatomically of one gender but identifying as the other has gone into the other restroom and been protected legally under anti-discrimination laws.

Harassment, public threatening, indecent exposure--laws of that sort having to do with behavior would still apply.

As it happens, there is a bill at the Legislature to take care of Rapert's concern. Of course there is.

House Bill 1228 by Rep. Bob Ballinger would authorize any of us to assert our religion to break any law we found objectionable. This bill ties into that parable from earlier in the session about the baker who might get forced by federal troops to prepare a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

Even Hutchinson's office has indicated Ballinger's bill is broad and perhaps in need of amendments.

What it is in need of is defeat, but that perhaps asks too much.

But, oddly enough, a religion bill did get tabled the other day in a House committee.

Rep. Justin Harris of West Fork, who operates with state aid a preschool program that got crossways with state officials for running a Bible class, put in a bill to say a child could not be denied the right to engage in personal religious expression in school--in artwork or writings or personal clothing, for example.

Harris couldn't garner enough votes for a do-pass recommendation after a discussion in which a few people asked in vain for an explanation of precisely what was broken and in need of that particular repair.

What is broken and in need of repair is the crumbling wall of separation between church and state.

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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 02/26/2015

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