Out of tune

Venue’s challenge of covid-19 limits misplaced

As far as promotion goes, the organizers of a controversial concert in Fort Smith once scheduled for tonight have gotten it, in spades.

A concert by singer Travis McCready for less than 230 fans, at a venue few people much beyond western Arkansas have heard of, has gained attention from around the globe in what TempleLive organizers describe as a polite fight against Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s covid-19 emergency restrictions.

Polite the fight may be, but nothing less than American freedom is at stake if the organizers of events at the 90-year-old former Masonic Temple Building are to be believed.

As of Thursday, the concert was postponed, but it wasn’t because the operators of TempleLive had a change of heart. It had more to do with the fact Arkansas’ Alcoholic Beverage Control showed up Thursday and removed the venue’s permit to sell alcohol. The state agency suspended the license Thursday morning.

“We fought the law and the laws won,” is the way Mike Brown, vice president of TempleLive, put it in a Thursday press conference that might best be described as mournful defiance.

Mournful in that venue officials wrapped their desire to hold the concert — three days before the state-mandated ban on large-venue events is set to end — in the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the general concept of American liberty.

“’We, the People’ is three amazing words, and they’ve been trampled on today,” Brown lamented Thursday.

And defiant in that the venue’s representatives say they will consider options to pursue legal action against the state even as they grudgingly moved the planned concert to Monday, the first day large venues are permitted to reopen under heavy Department of Health restrictions designed to protect against the spread of covid-19.

The tempest has intensified in recent days as it became clear TempleLive officials intended to move ahead with tonight’s planned concert. In their estimation, the $20-a-ticket performance was no different than the state allowing worshippers to gather at nearby churches to hear a similar performance. Somehow, we suspect there are a few differences.

Without question, in “normal” times, government interference in a performance could be problematic if the reason for it, and to some degree the impact of it, infringed on constitutional rights such as freedom of speech or of assembly. But the governor didn’t ban TempleLive from putting on a concert based on taking offense to a song or the views to be expressed among concertgoers. Rather, the governor had a job to do in protecting the public from the spread of a deadly virus.

Do TempleLive promoters suggest the governor and the state’s public health authorities should have no such emergency powers?

Lance Beaty, president of the company that bought and renovated the old Masonic Temple, offered his evaluation of Arkansas’ response to the worldwide pandemic in response to a question of whether the clash with the governor was worth it. “Something may kill you, but for most of us it’s not going to be this virus,” Beaty said in Thursday’s press conference. “They got it wrong. They just got it wrong. They got caught flat-footed, despite their best intentions. They got bad data and bad models, and it yielded bad decisions. The economy’s decimated, we’ve got 26 million people out of work, 30 million. Yeah, 30 million! And so yes, it’s worth it. It’s our obligation. In this particular situation, I’m not having to jump out of a helicopter in a jungle, but I’m fighting for the same rights.”

Who knew so much rested on a Travis McCready concert?

TempleLive officials made plans for this concern based on their own mistaken assumption that the state, by now, would have permitted it to reopen, then Hutchinson set May 18 as the date for large venues to reopen under strict limits. It was all part of Hutchinson’s phased rollout of Arkansas’ economic reopening, the goal of which is to carefully monitor any growth in the spread of covid-19.

We think TempleLive has been conscientious in its precautions, but by jumping ahead of the stateset date for opening, TempleLive appears much like a child who dislikes the parameters placed on him by a concerned parent. What difference does three days make, the petulent child might ask? And in asking why a performance in a church two blocks away is any different than the McCready concert, one can almost hear a youngster’s protests that his parents allow his less rambunctious brother more freedom, at least at the moment.

A cynic might suggest TempleLive has gotten far, far more in publicity than it could ever have afforded. But, why not? That’s the American way.

Who should Arkansans trust, though, in a pandemic to be mindful of the overall well-being of the public? Would you choose people who have devoted their lives to public leadership and health, or would you replace the judgment of the elected representative of the people with that of concert promoters charging $20 a head?

Hutchinson or the Department of Health’s Dr. Nate Smith have not been perfect in executing Arkansas’ response to covid-19, but it’s ludicrous to suggest they’ve set out to treat TempleLive unfairly when the state’s limits have applied evenhandedly to all large entertainment or performance venues.

In a pandemic, it’s hardly reasonable to suggest the governor should just shrug when a state-licensed venue decides to go rogue.

Brown said all of this “doesn’t feel like America to me.” Nothing about a response to a pandemic will feel good in a land born of the concept of freedom. But as Americans have shown throughout their history, they’re sometimes willing to embrace short-term sacrifice for the long-term good of the nation’s people.

This is one of those times.