Valentine's Day at the state legislative session was filled with fun and frivolity, until it wasn't.
By the clever initiative years ago of local Associated Press reporter Andrew DeMillo, Valentine's Days occurring during regular sessions have become occasions in which legislators, reporters, columnists and others attempt clever Valentine's Day puns.
These offerings are posted on Twitter. The idea is that the be-my-valentine stylings will draw humorously from legislative themes.
For example: "Roses are red. Violets are blue. Any bill that irks Brummett starts a fight about who can run it."
That clumsy little gem came Thursday from the state Senate president pro tempore, Jim Hendren.
When someone shot back to him that legislators ought to be writing legislation instead of poetry, I interjected frantically to say we'd all be better off if these guys stuck to poetry.
The best valentine-related legislative lyricism of the day came from freshman Democratic state Rep. Megan Godfrey of Springdale.
She cleverly managed to play with the names of her closest friends among other freshman Democratic women in the House--Tippi McCullough, Denise Garner, Jamie Scott and Nicole Clowney--as she wrote: "I'm past the Tippi-ng point. I'm not off Scott-free. You've Garner-ed my attention. You're all special to me. I'm not Clowney-ing around. I hope you'll be mine. To the freshmen Dem women, be my ... ['galentine.']"
But that was in the morning. By the afternoon, Godfrey was choking back tears in the well of the House as she pleaded for broader understanding from mostly male and overwhelmingly conservative colleagues.
The debate was on Senate Bill 149 by Sen. Jason Rapert, et al. It was a simple bill providing that, on or about the moment the U.S. Supreme Court overturns a woman's right to choose, a woman in Arkansas no longer has a right to an abortion regardless of whether her pregnancy is from rape or incest and even if the doctor tells her that her child will be born dead or die soon after.
A pregnancy could be ended only to save the life of the mother.
I've talked before with Megan Godfrey about this issue. I've waited for her to regain her composure so that she could continue.
She had a miscarriage seven years ago. She said no one else could ever know how a woman who loses a baby feels that next Mother's Day.
She said many women have told her painful stories of ended pregnancies. She said there are, in those stories, tragic human circumstances far more complicated than a single sweeping ban on any pregnancy's termination except to save the life of the mother.
Godfrey said on the House floor on the afternoon of Valentine's Day that she knew some people saw the issue through a simple and clear moral and biblical lens. She said she knew the pushback was coming.
But she said the bill under consideration simply dismissed and disregarded women whose hearts already were broken.
Advocates of the measure will rush to say it was handled in the House by a woman, Rep. Mary Bentley of Perryville. But that's like dismissing racial misconduct by a police force because the police chief is black.
The bill passed, 72-20, of course.
After the vote, Rep. Nicole Clowney of Fayetteville took a solemn selfie as she rode the House elevator. She posted on Facebook her look of hurt and sadness. She said it was important for women to see what she was feeling.
She wrote: "Among other things, here is what was passed: If a woman finds out at 20 weeks that her baby will die during, or hours after, childbirth, she does not have the right to terminate the pregnancy. We were told, on the House floor, that the intent behind this was to 'help mothers grieve.' To repeat, today, as a House, we voted that it is the state of Arkansas's job to legislate how mothers grieve the loss of their infants * . This vote will be traumatic to many women, including many mothers who have grieved these kinds of losses. I post this photo only to say to you women: Your story matters to me. You matter to me."
The argument is not really abortion. There aren't a great many pro-abortion people.
And the issue is not Jason Rapert's grandstanding or Mary Bentley's narrow conservatism.
The issue is the cold and dismissive over-simplification of the complexity of circumstances of terminated pregnancies.
It's that there must be a way to work toward preventing abortion without telling even one woman that she doesn't count--without telling even one woman that, no matter the circumstance, her baby is not her business, but our business.
By Thursday afternoon, it wasn't Valentine's Day anymore at the state Capitol.
Roses are red. Violets are blue. Your baby, your body, your grief--the state will decide all that, not you.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 02/17/2019