Deal or no deal?

The strong rumor at the state Capitol early in the week was that the arch-conservative, prolife and thus powerful Arkansas Family Council had cut a deal with legislators.

It was that the church-supported “family values” group would back off on lobbying for state Sen. Jason Rapert’s effort to extend the upcoming fiscal session to pass that Texas-styled anti-abortion scheme by which the state gives money to citizens who file suit against incidents of abortion.

In exchange, as the rumor went, the Family Council would get firsttime state money for pro-life services at nonprofit pregnancy centers around the state.

“You know how gossip is,” Jerry Cox, the Family Council’s president and lobbyist, told me Tuesday. “It takes on a life of its own. We don’t make deals. But if you look around there’s usually some basis in fact that led to it.”

He acknowledged a confluence of facts that might look like a deal to the untrained eye.

Here’s something else it looks like: trouble in the Arkansas Christian Right’s sanctimony paradise.

Cox said he personally lobbied legislators to extend the recent special session to take up Rapert’s Texas-adapted bill, which he helped write.

The Senate declined at the behest of the governor and its leadership, which didn’t judge the bill ripe for such an extraordinary procedure. A Texas-style law almost certainly would be enjoined immediately.

Cox insisted that he and his organization still support the Texas bill, sort of. But he said the current plan is to mail a policy briefing on the bill to members and invite them to call legislators if they choose. But it is not, at this point, for him to lobby personally for extending the fiscal session to take up the measure.

Cox already has made a blog post—dated Feb. 2—reporting that he had recently been advised that a Texas-style ban might not stop all abortions in Arkansas, which it did, practically, in Texas. That’s because the U.S. Supreme Court, while letting the Texas law stand, allowed “pre-enforcement” lawsuits should it be duplicated in other states.

Some of the most conservative, pro-life state legislators see the Texas law as dubious and unnecessary. They understand that the real case is already pending from Mississippi before the U.S. Supreme Court. They don’t want to extend legislative activity only to oblige Rapert’s campaign for lieutenant governor.

Cox probably has heard what I’ve heard, which is that legislators have had it with Rapert’s going around the state saying they need to be replaced with more genuinely pro-life legislators. He knows that there are toxic relations among so-called Christian conservatives in the Legislature, particularly on the Senate side, and that it’s best not to mix himself and his organization up in that if he can help it.

Meantime, Cox said that his group—quite separately—has long advocated for state funding of “pregnancy centers,” about 40 of which exist already in the state and more of which likely will spring up if abortion, as expected, becomes significantly more restricted. The idea of these centers is to limit abortions, or replace them, by giving frightened young women with unwanted pregnancies pre-natal and post-natal care as well as counseling about jobs, child care, nutrition and health. He said several other states— red ones like Arkansas—provide public funding for such places and services.

Yes, Cox said, he lately has been more active than before in talking with the governor’s office and legislators about adding state funding for these centers in the special session. But, no, he insisted, he has not advocated, as rumors have had it, that the Family Council’s ARFuture Foundation, which was founded two years ago to support pregnancy centers, get designated the pass-through agency collecting fees. He said his agency didn’t want that kind of bureaucratic work.

“The proof will be in the pudding,” Cox said. “If a bill comes out showing money flowing to us, then you can take me out here and crucify me.”

Most likely, he said, there will be some effort in the fiscal session to add money through an existing appropriation, maybe in the Health Department, to establish a process to make grants directly to the centers.

And Rapert? He’s surely displeased. He said Cox “went behind my back and the back of Rep. Mary Bentley [the House sponsor of the Texas-styled bill], and went into a meeting with the very people who stopped this bill when it came up before and came out all smiling with money for these resource centers.”

Rapert said he found it “unseemly” that a pro-life organization confronted with imminent victory on abortion would be looking around “for another way to raise money.”

Cox said he wasn’t even going to try to respond to that.

He may get another opportunity. State Sen. Jim Hendren is promising on Twitter that the “independent caucus,” of which he is the lone member, will be asking more questions about a “gross deal” he’s heard about.