OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: Solution lacking problem


Issue 3 that you will confront in the general election offers super-duper extra constitutional protection for your right not to have to do anything the state government requires that you believe places a "burden" on your religion.

We have a state law that offers that protection already. It came up when all the religiously anti-gay florists and bakers didn't want to be forced to make flower arrangements and bake cakes for the newly legal same-sex weddings.

But that's just a statute and it refers to a "substantial" burden on one's religion. Issue 3 would be affixed in constitutional law, thus supreme and beyond easy amendment. And it would remove any insistence that the burden must be substantial.

Any little old burden would do. Any little old professed burden might do.

To be perfectly clear: Issue 3's special hall pass permitting individual unlawful conduct would apply even as all the non-burdened people would have to abide by the requirement from which an individual would be personally exempt by no less an authority than the Arkansas Constitution.

How complainants would go about getting their hall passes officially stamped ... I just don't know. Nor does anyone else.

I suspect lawyers would be involved.

This is a Jason Rapert deal. He will soon be gone from the state Senate, having been trounced for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor by that woman last seen telling Jon Stewart she didn't have basic answers off the top from the seat of her pants, which she referred to as off the top of her head.

But Rapert's Ten Commandments monument on the Capitol grounds will live long beyond him. Now the state Constitution might also.

I also continue to hear that Rapert might become chief of staff for the bankruptcy-filing, ethics-cited Mark Lowery if Lowery gets elected as expected--because he is the Republican in the race--to be in charge of all our state government money as state treasurer.

It is against my religion that Lowery be state treasurer. With the passage of Issue 3, I shall quickly be about retaining legal counsel to take my case to court to remove my money from any treasury overseen by Mark Lowery as assisted by Jason Rapert.

Jerry Cox--head of the evangelical Christian political lobby called the Family Council, and Church Lady II to Rapert's Church Lady I--acknowledged to this newspaper the other day that there is not really much direct threat right now to religious freedom in Arkansas.

But he said there might be, because you never know, and that his group would be distributing tracts through churches urging people to "not let them cancel your faith."

"Them?" Well, don't you remember those with the government who tried to keep people alive during covid by suggesting they not attend church?

I received enough New Testament learning as a boy to wonder how anyone could cancel another's faith. Your faith is yours. It's inside you. It sustains you. It's between you and your god.

Some government somewhere without our Bill of Rights might presume to cancel your free open manifestation of your faith. But not the faith.

Our profound U.S. Constitution has us fully covered on all this. It says you, as an American, have freedom when it comes to your religion. It says the government cannot establish any religion, but must leave that to the devices of the religious people.

That a flower shop doesn't want to sell flowers for a same-sex wedding is not remotely a good enough reason to tinker with that simple federal concept that has worked for more than 200 years.

That it's against my religion for Mark Lowery to be state treasurer is a better reason, but even that's not enough.

While on this subject, I will place here--relegated to the bottom--the mischievous but interesting point offered to me last week by a local lawyer of considerable renown for noble cases and competent command of the law books.

He enclosed a definition of Sharia Law as a body of law, punishment, custom and behavior that is grounded in the Islamic faith. Issue 3, this lawyer says, would protect anyone practicing Sharia law.

I cite the lawyer's argument only to make the point that, when people around here talk about special super-duper rights to protect religion, they seem to be thinking only of their religion.

I would suggest a "no" vote on Issue 3 until we can get better evidence of a real problem--other, that is, than with the coming treasurer's office.


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.



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