Girdeth thy loins and strap in tightly, Fayetteville friends, as you normally tolerant, accepting citizens again board the tumultuous Nondiscrimination Express Roller Coaster.
It obviously wasn't enough for two municipal officials and four other members of the city council last December to put the people of Fayetteville through the painfully divisive fight over what always has struck me as an unnecessary ordinance designed to ensure discrimination is illegal in the university city of Fayetteville.
Now after fewer than six months (when 52 percent of voters chose to repeal the controversial ordinance) news accounts say aldermen Matthew Petty and Adella Gray have decided to hopefully put the community through the stomach-churning ordeal yet again.
Other than Eureka Springs, I can't imagine any Arkansas city with businesses less likely to discriminate on the basis of sexual identity or how one identifies his or her gender.
Flanked by two local ministers in clergy collars and the city's Chamber of Commerce Director Steve Clark, Gray said she and Petty "want everyone to know that discrimination is not accepted in the city of Fayetteville, and that's the reason we're coming forward with a new locally prepared ordinance," according to a news account by reporter Joel Walsh.
Their proposed new-and-improved law that has to be okayed by a vote of the full council that approved the initial ordinance by a 6-2 vote citizens then repealed at a special election four months later.
This version is known as the "Uniform Civil Rights Protection" ordinance. The current council will hear the first reading of the remodeled version next week. And then we will see what transpires.
Truthfully, I'm still waiting to see a solid example in Fayetteville that anyone has discriminated on these grounds.
You surely understand what I mean: Solid grounds for establishing genuine need to create a law against treating each other unfairly because of our preferences and beliefs.
I'll gladly and perhaps even outragedly (my word) accept one good example.
Nonetheless, unlike its hyper-contentious predecessor offered and fostered by Petty (I suspect at the urging of a national push), this latest attempt if again approved by the council would go before voters at a special election at a cost to the city of some $34,000.
Yep, it will cost the city that much to vote on the proposed law that also will require the city attorney to handle complaints and the council to appoint a seven-member commission to determine if a business person discriminated against someone else because of their sexual nature and preferences.
I'd rather see the council appoint a commission to handle pothole and parking complaints originating from the wrongheaded kiosk system the city adopted a few years back. Now therein lie a few genuine and demonstrable problems affecting most of the public. I digress, sorry.
This time around, Gray and Petty say churches, religious schools and day-care facilities (comprising much of the opposition the first time around) would be exempt from their proposed law. That leaves local businesses such as those that sell and lease along with the city itself.
Pushing this national movement, especially so relentlessly, in Fayetteville has always had the feel to me of pure political maneuvering. It serves to foster the public aggrandizement of those who stand before the microphones and display how tolerant and benevolent and open-minded they are, especially compared with those who, well, supposedly aren't.
But I'm just finding it all but impossible to find any bigots in Fayetteville's businesses. Seen any? Please let me know if you happen across one and I'll gladly disclose their unfair biases.
While on the subject, will some knowledgeable person please explain to me, once we identify which preferences and predilections are legally defined as protected from discrimination, does that then mean it's both acceptable and legal to discriminate against those who haven't been so designated? Just who's not legally protected?
Hey, I'm just curious.
E. coli dangers
Everyone notice that the Arkansas Department of Health closed 19 swim beaches in the state because of elevated E. coli bacteria counts? The heavy, sustained rains have flushed the animal-waste-based bacteria into area waters.
It was enough to make me wonder what E. coli counts are being registered in and around the Buffalo National River as a result of millions of gallons of swine waste being regularly sprayed on fields along Big Creek, a major tributary of the Buffalo that flows just six miles upstream.
Those counts already have been measured as elevated, according to Dr. John Van Brahana, the emeritus geoscience professor at the University of Arkansas who with volunteers has spent two years measuring the subsurface flow of water and potential contamination around the 6,500-hog factory sponsored and supplied by Cargill Inc.
The National Park Service, caretakers of the country's first national river, also are conducting similar tests to check water quality in the river that thousands visit regularly for swimming and recreation.
I'll keep you posted on what these latest samplings show in the wake of all the flooding and rising water tables.
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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mikemasterson10@hotmail.com.
Editorial on 06/13/2015