I do things so you won't have to.
So it was that I sat with state Sen. Jason Rapert on Wednesday and interviewed him for 30 minutes--interrupted him was more like it, he would say--for 15 minutes of air time at 9 a.m. today on the Talk Business program on KATV, Channel 7.
Rapert is a bit of a pill. He demanded that Roby Brock of Talk Business affirm in writing that he wouldn't edit his comments out of context, but run them in full blocks.
I guess I should be more gracious. It was good of Rapert to grant the interview at all, considering the way I've hammered him over the years for his colorful pronouncements, a couple of which we talked about in the half-hour.
Brock is an unassailably fair and objective journalist. But, after all, the associate he had interviewing Rapert was an opinion columnist whose expressed opinion of Rapert is, shall we say, not uniformly positive. So perhaps the senator was entitled to try to protect himself.
I meant him no harm. I meant only to draw him out, then to write a column correcting him as needed.
The arch-conservative and frequently passionate senator/preacher came loaded for bear. I suspect he stays that way.
My first question, and really the only one: Isn't the current raging issue of protections against discrimination for gays a matter of whether to choose for the religion of some or the rights of some?
Here is Rapert's response, as well as his unabashedly expressed theme on the overall issue of rights for homosexuals, even more generally on the way he thinks America ought to be: The mainstream majority should rule, period. Judges are out of control in defying the will of the majority. Gays shouldn't be fired because they're gay, but they don't need special new protections from discrimination because federal civil rights laws banning discrimination on account of "sex" apply to them already. Gays are simply trumping up a political movement that offends some people unnecessarily on religious or moral grounds, and liberals are grandstanding.
Perhaps you see the need for meek and polite interruption.
The mainstream majority cannot rule absolutely--and was never meant to rule absolutely. That would risk a tyranny of the majority that would not guarantee the protection of individual liberties guaranteed by the document that really rules in this country, which is the Constitution, both as a set of principles and a rule of law.
The mainstream majority can get it badly wrong. For example: Arkansas voted for a state constitutional amendment to defy the federal government and impose segregated schools.
Rapert says the state segregation amendment was undone appropriately by the people themselves acting in the majority-- first through their elected congressional representatives in the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act, and then directly by the Arkansas voters (in 1990, barely).
He gives little or no credit where it first and most decisively belongs--to Brown v. Board of Education, to a lawsuit, to a judge, to a panel of eminent judges.
As for the rest of the senator's theme: Sex discrimination protections in the federal civil rights code apply most usually to women in the workplace. They have never been extended to sexual orientation.
If they did so apply, then Rapert and Sen. Bart Hester and others would not have needed to pass that bill saying no local government in Arkansas may enact its own ordinance protecting gays from mistreatment.
Why bother passing a state law to keep a local government from doing what the federal government supposedly has done already?
I asked the senator about a few matters beyond the gay discrimination issue. Generally, they fell under this heading: Would he acknowledge sometimes overreacting and becoming overemotional in some of his social media posts that have stirred controversy?
He said maybe. He said he had passion for right.
I believe he admitted in rapid passing, in sort of a verbal parenthesis, that he perhaps should not have said "nearly treasonous" to refer to our nation's returning the Ebola-infected doctor for treatment at the Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. I'll have to watch to be sure.
But as for his Facebook suggestion that a small tactical nuclear weapon be fired at ISIS, he maintained that President Obama--whom he wants to impeach, by the way--should not preemptively remove that option.
If you missed the segment on television this morning, be advised that the full 30-minute conversation will be available online sometime today or later at talkbusiness.net, if you wish to keep score at home.
I wouldn't call it sterling public dialogue. But I think it may be moderately important public dialogue.
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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 03/08/2015