State Religion Czar Jason Rapert has issued God’s position on constitutional precepts, majority will and same-sex attraction.
He has done so in a lengthy memorandum published Sunday in this newspaper.
In case you missed it, allow me to report that Rapert, a state senator, related that God:
- Decrees that he loves same-sex intertwiners and that they may sin as they please like anyone else, so long as they don’t get married.
- Decrees that the phrase “we the people” in the U.S. Constitution supersedes anything subsequently set out in that document. None of the ensuing principles of the Constitution—free expression, equal protection, due process—matter if the majority of the people decide they don’t like them.
- Decrees that the above-mentioned established line of authority—with God endowing the majority of Arkansas people with ultimate rightness and power—devolves from the United States’ role as his chosen country and, more to the point, Arkansas’ role as his preferred state. We of this state are specially and divinely endowed to exercise absolute authority and freedom, except, that is, to get married to somebody whose testosterone-estrogen ratio is very similar to our own.
- Dismisses the time-honored notion that our founders didn’t so much trust the people on everything and reserved in the aforementioned Constitution the real authority not to an actual democracy, but to a semi-detached republic encompassing democratic elements.
- Decrees that persons of a same-sex persuasion do not possess the full rights of black people—that the cause of full rights for black people is noble, but the cause of full rights for gay people is less so.
- Deems America to be a Judeo-Christian country, not a free country separating religion and state that condones weird stuff like whatever Cat Stevens is doing.
- Is none too pleased with Chris Piazza, Max Brantley, Rachel Maddow or me.
It’s really simple, so let me boil it down: The correct and holy opinion is the one Jason expresses.
The tragedy, then, is that Jason wasn’t born until 1972. It is not clear who was relaying God’s decrees before that time.
Unfortunately, I was unaware of anyone providing that service in the years 1956 and 1970 and 71.
I was but 3 myself in 1956 when the majority of the voting people of Arkansas voted to keep schools racially segregated no matter what the federal courts said.
We desperately needed Jason at that juncture to get God on the horn to tell him to tell us which was pre-eminent—the majority will of the people of Arkansas or the nobility of civil rights.
Those other years, ’70 and ’71, were my junior and senior years in high school.
At that time I attended with my family a small and dying Church of Christ congregation positioned in the middle of a black neighborhood on the east side of downtown Little Rock.
My dad, one of the elders, got the idea that we should invite the dark-complected people in the neighborhood to come to our church. “Go into all the world” also meant next door, he decided.
It caused one of the other elders to go bonkers, to drive away while burning rubber after an elders’ meeting. It split the little church, which didn’t have much going for it even before getting rent asunder.
That elder who peeled out—aware that I had developed certain worldly views that might be influencing my father—plopped down next to me on the pew one Sunday night. He told me that God meant for white and black people to be separate, just as he meant for redbirds and bluebirds to be separate.
So here was a guy who, like Jason, was presuming to tell me what God intended. But Jason says now that the guy was wrong.
So has God changed his mind since 1971? Or is Jason the real God’s agent and was the congregational elder of my youth an impostor?
The one thing we know for sure is that both can’t be impostors.
There couldn’t be two false prophets, one for then and another for now, could there?
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.