It captures the public's outrage like few stories in state government. That's because of the combustible mix of elements.
State Rep. Justin Harris of West Fork is a religious-right type who owns and operates a state-supported preschool that has been cited by the state for teaching religion on the state dollar. He sponsors bills such as the one that got hung up in committee last week to take a stand for the Lord, supposedly, by giving specific statutory authority for school kids to say "Merry Christmas" at school.
There was discussion that kids may say that already.
Harris rivals Jason Rapert in grandstanding on religious fundamentalism.
The story is that Harris and his wife, possessed of graduate degrees in childhood development, adopted two young girls who gave them big trouble. Then the Harrises "rehomed" the girls--meaning they physically conveyed control of them--to a man who worked for them at the preschool center.
Now Harris seeks to blame the state Human Services Department for the human disgrace that has become widely known from reporting last week in the Arkansas Times: The former employee was convicted of raping one of the girls.
Harris says he believed the man, now in prison, to be on the up-and-up, indeed more capable than he to take a shot at disciplining two little girls whom Harris describes as pet-crushing monsters of whom he had become afraid. He says he is heartbroken over what happened.
And Harris asserts that he didn't seek simply to return the girls to the Human Services Department because some employee there threatened him with child abandonment charges if he tried. It's an allegation the department can't dispute specifically under confidentiality laws, though it says generally that there always are options when an untenable home culture arises.
A conservative will usually find a way to blame the government. The Human Services Department--big and unwieldy and measured by how well it endures snafu and crisis--is an easy target.
There are three main reasons, in rapidly descending order of importance and fairness, for the public's highly disturbed obsession:
Helpless children, dependent as ever on adults, got spectacularly failed, indeed spectacularly wronged, by adults presuming to help them.
The matter introduces a new and comical word and concept--"rehoming," as of children, which most of us had never heard of until last week. The word fast permeates the popular lexicon. I heard a woman last week tell her husband she was going to "rehome" him if he didn't straighten up. The very idea of adopting two girls, now 6 and 8, then unilaterally taking it upon oneself no longer to care for them, but to give them to someone else ... well, people can't imagine that it's not expressly illegal. And it isn't.
Regrettably, our political culture is so diseased by hatred between left and right and the opposing political parties that this matter comes to be viewed not entirely on a transcendent human level, but on a polarizing Republican-Democratic level and a conservative-liberal level.
Uniformly, Republicans and conservatives have been saying that, while of course this is an unspeakable tragedy and of course we need to consider legislation to address this "rehoming" business, they see no need to condemn Harris.
And, just as uniformly, Democrats and liberals have been saying Harris deserves special scorn because he professes religious sanctimony and is thus exposed for hypocrisy; that, in fact, he ought to be expelled from the House of Representatives for the simple known fact that he turned over two little girls in his charge to a man who raped one of them.
I understand the temptation of persons with religious tolerance to chortle over this predicament besetting one of such smug religious intolerance and sanctimony. But, really, there is nothing remotely suitable for chortling here.
I incurred the social media wrath of liberals late last week for criticizing as precipitous--and susceptible to the appearance of exploitation--the state Democratic Party's official statement Friday afternoon calling for Harris' removal from the state Legislature.
We need to regain the ability--one I believe we indeed once had--to consider some matters, at least, from a perspective of personal independence and universal humanity. Decency to children should be one of those matters.
Republicans can continue to pursue strategic defensiveness. Democrats can continue to seek to take advantage of what they see as an opportunity. But neither is an attractive or winning position.
The politics will fall out from this affair only naturally from the fuller emergence of facts and the continued human reaction of the public at large.
This one is not to be spun. It is to be lamented, deplored, decried, investigated and fixed.
On this one, smart politicians need only to watch the people march, then fall in at the back of the line.
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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 03/10/2015