Let’s be civil now

Gay-union politics

Roby Brock of Talk Business— the television show, the magazine, the website and the radio program—happened to be putting his automated pollster into action Thursday night.

The original purpose of this particular survey, done as usual in partnership with the political science department of Hendrix College in Conway, was to size up the congressional primaries of both parties in the 4th District across most of the southern half of Arkansas.

Hustling news hound that he is, Brock added a last-minute query wondering what these South Arkansas respondents thought about gay marriage.

After all, the president of the United States had made the historic announcement the day before that he favored it.

About 9 p.m., Brock got his numbers back from more than 800 automated calls to southern Arkansas households—437 to likely Republican voters and 418 to likely Democratic voters.

Let me give you the Republican numbers first.

Likely GOP primary voters across South Arkansas who got called by the poll and who favored “civil marriage” by gays amounted to . . . well, let’s see. It was such a small number I seem to have misplaced it. Oh, yes, here it is: 6 percent. Those opposing gay marriage? That would be 92 percent.

The remaining 2 percent ran screaming from the phone or were otherwise undecided.

Among the Democrats of southern Arkansas, the rout in this survey was less, but a certain rout nonetheless.

Twenty-six percent favored gay marriage and 69 percent opposed it.

These numbers demonstrate vividly the deep disconnection between this Democratic president and the people even of his own party who live in and between the piney woods and farms of the lower half of Arkansas.

Perhaps now you can see why I raise the prospect that a crank from Tennessee could get a resounding vote on May 22 only because he appears on our Democratic primary ballot as the sole alternative to President Barack Obama.

The numbers also demonstrate vividly the rural Arkansas disconnection from the bold generational change taking hold nationally.

Arkansas is on the wrong side of history once more.

Gays are gaining acceptance rapidly. Opposing their right to marry because of a religious belief makes little sense. It’s the sexual orientation itself, not any document on file at the courthouse, that some people find so religiously abominable.

Denying the document doesn’t change the orientation.

Beliefs about sin aside, someone else’s marriage is nobody’s business. People on their second and third and fourth traditional marriages (Arkansas has one of the nation’s highest divorce rates) ought to tend to their own business, not the “sanctity” of an institution they actually trivialize.

A natural same-sex attraction is not the same—as some of my correspondents argue—as marrying a sibling or taking multiple spouses. Those are inherently destructive and abusive behaviors.

In the meantime, the best way to hold down the antiObama protest vote in southern Arkansas might be for the Republican congressional primary to get a lot more action than the Democratic one. That could well happen. It stands as a testament to the seminal change in Arkansas politics that the state’s hottest primary will take place for the congressional nomination on the Republican side in the 4th District.

That is where, not long ago, Bubba could be counted on to climb down from his pickup to vote Democratic.

He did so in honor of tradition, at least as long as he could vote for a Democrat distancing himself from his national party and calling himself a Blue Dog.

But most of the acting this spring is between two Republican congressional combatants: Tom Cotton, the Harvard lawyer and Mideast war veteran from Dardanelle who is allied with neoconservatives nationally; and Beth Anne Rankin, the former Miss Arkansas from Magnolia who is allied with her old boss, Mike Huckabee.

Oh, by the way: The Talk Business numbers showed Cotton ahead, 5133. He’s likely the next congressman from South Arkansas.

Brock and I will talk about these findings on his television show at 10 p.m. today on KLRT-FOX 16 in Little Rock.