Legislatin’ on the frontier

At least the Sanders administration is taking a little time before even introducing a bill to undercut traditional public education.

You indeed ought to engage in careful proofreading before spending money to move kids from public schools to private and church ones for conservative indoctrination in place of alleged but nonexistent liberal indoctrination.

The Arkansas General Assembly, by contrast, is practicing medicine again and doing so with contemplations taking less time than most surgeries.

A west Arkansas farmer/rancher — a state senator by the name of Gary Stubblefield — rolled the pickup into Little Rock and plopped down a bill to put the quietus to gender medical treatments for youth. It does that by saying that anyone practicing gender-affecting medicine on minors, by their professional decision and with parental consent, can be sued at any point in the space of 30 years by anyone regretting the treatments during that time or sustaining complications presumably from them.

He got the bill passed in committee by similarly conservative legislators afraid of going home after being fair-minded enough to transgender youth to suggest that everyone slow down a bit in telling medical doctors what to do. The committee was delayed only an hour or so while a lonely Little Rock senator — Clarke Tucker — and a few physicians voiced ignored objections.

The committee did pause long enough for Sen. Matt McKee of Pearcy to ask a testifying transgender woman if she had a penis. The audience groaned. She said the question was “horrible.” He said she was the one who brought it up, which, thank goodness, she actually hadn’t.

It was a defining moment in modern lawmaking Arkansas-style.

The professional medical testimony at the Senate committee hearing three days ago went as follows:

Hormonal and other treatments for gender-dysphoric minors are rare in Arkansas and undertaken only by medical professionals’ studied determinations, often having to do with a youth’s mental health, and with parental consent. Stubblefield’s bill would, by design, put that kind of thing out of business by using the hammer of malpractice susceptibility for decades.

Tucker’s objections were largely as follows: This bill is discriminatory and in violation of the equal-protection clause of the U.S. Constitution by singling out from otherwise existing malpractice law one form of established medical practice designed to help one group of children. He said the thrust of the legislation was to tell troubled people among us that we don’t approve of them or care about them.

And here is my view: This cowboy frontier legislating taking hold in modern Arkansas is out of control.

Laws are important and should be based on deliberative processes, not on penis-focusing old boys who don’t like transgender persons — or doctors much anymore after they tried to limit covid — and who turn the reckless bills they pull out of their glove boxes into law in a matter of hours.

Even if there might be elements of legitimate legislative inquiry buried deep in their prejudice, any citizen legislature’s usurping of the discretion of professional physicians ought to be done, if at all, slowly, thoughtfully and indirectly by administrative regulation or regulatory board oversight. It should not be done by political kangaroo-ism. All of it should be subjected to established administrative procedures that dictate professional involvement and impose time for public comment and other review.

Let’s say it’s fair and appropriate for a legislator to have concerns about gender-transitioning medical practices for minors. I’m not prepared to argue it isn’t.

What’s important at that point is for people to take actions on those concerns only in their lanes. The people do not — or should not — elect a local good ol’ boy to the state Legislature to start practicing medicine with only the license of a legislative car tag.

The first thing a legislator should do is put in a resolution for interim study by a relevant legislative committee of the issue of gender therapy for minors. It should be offered for the stated purpose of determining whether relevant state regulators such as the Medical Board ought to embark on a peer-reviewed process to establish rules for the protection of children, parents and medical professionals.

No one would need to ask a testifying transgender woman what she was packing in the way of private parts.

A good ol’ boy in the Legislature could boast to his transgender-disapproving constituents back home that he’d gone to Little Rock and done everything he could, which was lean hard on the doctors to account for themselves and possibly submit to stringent rules and regulations.

That way, the good ol’ boys in the Legislature could spend more of their time undercutting public education and confining their obsession on a woman’s private parts to private exchanges, risking a slap to the face rather than a video currently a tad viral on Twitter.