Cynics, cowards and politics

Gov. Sarah Sanders played the cynically irrelevant card last week. Her liberal Democratic resisters played the fearfully evasive one in response. Everyone played on the margins of fact and substance.

Maybe, on Sanders’ part, it was because of slipping poll numbers. Maybe it was for the purpose of competitiveness in the Trump vice presidential sweepstakes, in which any tendency toward Pence-like respect for reality will be disqualifying. Maybe she simply is a cynical tactician always looking to stoke fears with exaggeration and alarm, finding full and fair context limiting and boring. Her dad could be a tad hyperbolic, as I recall.

On the liberal Democrats’ part, it seems clear that fear-based evasion is their way of life, at least when they’re among Southerners and swing voters.

Here’s what happened. The Biden administration had been working for years on changing Title IX rules in the Education Department to roll back those imposed during the Trump presidency that lessened protections from sexual abuse, harassment, discrimination and bullying. It finally came out with them last week, and, mostly, they give LGBTQ students more protections in the disciplinary or quasi-judicial review process on college campuses when they allege discrimination or unfair treatment. For example, they will no longer have to take part in live, in-person hearings. They may take part remotely. They may grant interviews with investigators in private. They may give questions for the accused to the investigators.

If you want to demonize the Biden administration for being sensitive in handling of discrimination allegations by minority groups based on sexual orientation or gender identity, then go ahead. Stand up for bullying if you must, if your version of the Lord so commands.

But know this much: Nowhere in these new Title IX rules did the Biden administration’s Education Department say anything about transgender girls taking part in girls’ sports. It punted on that, conspicuously. It was obvious the Biden administration considered this moment, with a raging election on, no time to veer one way or the other. One way loses swing voters. The other way offends the base.

Our Faubusian Wallace-lite of a demagoguing governor, Sarah Sanders, responded with an announcement that she would stand in the schoolhouse door and defy the federal government to deny the entry of sensitivity toward sexual and gender minorities. But she couched the situation in a significantly exaggerated way. She said the Biden administration’s action showed that it plainly wanted to force former males into females’ athletic competition and force males and females to shower together. Not in Arkansas, she said, of this thing the Biden administration’s new rules didn’t say, at least not yet.

No other Republican state has gone quite as far in open defiance. Several of those states plan joint litigation against the new rules — the actual ones, not Sanders’ exaggerated ones — to the extent that they conflict with state laws.

As for the local liberal or Democratic resistance, most of what I heard around here in response to Sanders’ schoolhouse-door stunt was that she was fabricating the whole thing because there is no recorded instance in the state of any transgender girl taking part in competitive sports in Arkansas, much less taking a sports prize.

What was notably absent from the response and disdain was any local liberal or Democratic argument that transgender girls must be allowed if they choose to try to outrun and outjump other girls for competitive glory.

That Sarah is a demagogue inventing problems is an easier and less risky political case to make than the challenging one of gender in women’s athletic competition.

I’ll tell you of someone else who doesn’t want to declare a position on transgender girls in girls’ sports: I don’t.

I believe that emotional, explosive cultural issues such as that should be handled in the place set up for them. That would be our cathedrals of truth, justice and equity, with their time-honored processes of evidentiary presentation, procedural even-handedness and formal appeals. I mean courts, of course. Politicians and the art of politics aren’t equipped.

How did we get the schools racially integrated? We did so by the court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education, with the politicians coming along after the fact, only under duress, to do as a last resort what was necessary to enforce the ruling.

How did we get the right of samesex marriage? We did so by court ruling. The leading politician of the time — a reputed great liberal, Barack Obama — came along later to describe himself as “evolved.”

Counting on politicians to handle such explosive delicacies is sheer folly, producing only cynical exploitation on one side and cowering evasion on the other.

Beware of the cynical exploiters. Pat the pitiable heads of the cowering evaders. And base your political votes on the things politicians otherwise do, such as spend money and provide schooling and join or avoid wars.

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 feed on X, formerly Twitter.