Commentary

JOHN BRUMMETT: Of sins and sinners

State Sen. Jason Rapert wants to put a monument of the Ten Commandments on the state Capitol grounds. He also says on social media that he still intends to vote for Donald Trump for president.

So shouldn't he erect instead a Nine Commandments monument, one deleting "thou shalt not commit adultery?" That one apparently doesn't count.

Or maybe he needs to dip down to an Eight Commandments monument, saving yet more money, by also leaving out "thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife."

That one probably depends on whether any of the women Trump bragged of grabbing uninvited by their personal parts--because they wanted him to grab them there on account of his being a star, he explains--was a neighbor.

So you think I'm joshing. But I'm merely applying consistent logic in advancement of an important point.

We now have plain evidence that the so-called Christian conservative element of Arkansas Republican politics has nothing to do with personal right-eousness or sin-shunning behavior.

Instead it's all about political polls, political preservation, the U.S. Supreme Court, keeping women from having authority over their own bodies, and discriminating against gays and lesbians and transgender persons because Christian conservatives in the Republican Party don't like the way those people act or look or both.

It can't be about what these conservative Christian Republicans say it's about--that they only want to deny equal rights to people doing things that are said by the Bible to be sinful. If that were so, these people wouldn't be voting for Trump to be president of the United States.

That's unless there's a scripture I'm unaware of that says men who lie with men and women who lie with women shall not enjoy rights as citizens but that married men who randomly grab the crotches of women shall become president.

If the issue was sin and denying rights to sinners, then Trump wouldn't be getting any votes from leading Arkansas Republican officeholders.

But he has the support of all of them except maybe House Speaker Jeremy Gillam, who, alone among the state's top Republicans, told the media over the weekend he'd be happy if Trump dropped out of the presidential race over that recording that has him talking of being creepy at the least, and a confessor of criminal assault at the worst.

The point is that polls show Trump will carry Arkansas widely even if he shows up at the Ole Miss game on Saturday, roots for the Rebels and randomly hoists unsuspecting female cheerleaders on both sidelines.

The only thing that could possibly stop Trump in Arkansas would be his grabbing the wrong set of private parts, those matching his own, or walking into the wrong public bathroom.

That's where the Christian conservative base of the Arkansas Republican Party seems to draw the Lord's red line.

So, fearful of offending their adultery-sanctioning and woman-discriminating and gay-discriminating base, the state's leading Republican officeholders--Gov. Asa Hutchinson, Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, Lieutenant Governor Tim Griffin, U.S. Senator John Boozman--worked up written statements deploring the nastiness of what Trump had been caught saying, but not pulling their support for him for president.

He's horrible, but we're all for him, they said.

The Republican governor of Alabama has pulled his support of Trump. But Alabama Republicans apparently work from a different biblical translation, one that includes all 10 commandments and blesses brutal bullying on the football field.

As president for four years, Trump probably would get to nominate two or three Supreme Court justices. They could overturn Roe v. Wade and thus discriminate against women by denying them rights over their bodies. And they could overturn same-sex marriage and discriminate otherwise against gays as well.

They might even rule that a florist could freely deny flowers for a same-sex wedding but could sell all the flowers he wanted to Trump's fourth wedding, and any succeeding.

Florists and bakers could legally put up a sign: "Grabbers of opposite genitalia only."

Hillary Clinton is the sinner, you see. She supports rights for women, gays, lesbians and transgender persons.

Her only outside chance in Arkansas is to grab Trump you-know-where at the next and last debate. She's got hold of him there in a way already.

But even that probably wouldn't be enough. Trump has famously said that he could shoot someone dead on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and not lose any votes.

So I'm thinking Trump just shortened our monument further. We're down to seven commandments now. Take out the prohibition on killing.

If we drew up a spreadsheet with the seven remaining commandments on one side and Trump on the other, we might find that we could go without this new monument at all.

I'm pretty sure "thou shalt not bear false witness" is a goner.

We're down to six sins and fading fast. Everything is all right by so-called Christian conservatives in Arkansas except being gay or a woman.

------------v------------

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 10/13/2016

Upcoming Events