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Are bathroom bills the best they’ve got?
The zeal in the Arkansas General Assembly for legislating how people exist — at least people thought of as “woke,” whatever that term is supposed to mean — defies a traditional conservative notion that the government that legislates least is the government that legislates best.
Perhaps we’re just reacting to the early days of a legislative session, when the governor’s stated top priority — education — lingers unspecified, awaiting some future debate once all the as-yet-unrevealed nuts and bolts of what Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ “Arkansas LEARNS” involves. It’s times like these that lawmakers can run amok, using the early days of legislative sessions to clean out their file drawers of bills that generate much heat and little fire.
The real and complex legislation will come later. This is the time for bills that will eventually be featured on mailed political postcards declaring how lawmakers did or didn’t stand up for the saving of America from the liberal hordes.
Arkansas politics is a trailing indicator of what’s happening at the national level. Cast nuance aside. As advanced as our methods of communication have become, it seems the exploration of substance and significance have been retarded. Why read the story when you can just react to 280 characters or less? Forget William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater. We’ve got Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Thoughtful vs. shallow — which one is winning these days?
Arkansas lawmakers are devoting considerable energy to protecting kids from CRT, or critical race theory, that’s not even being taught in the state’s public schools. But as with several of the bills filed at the state Capitol, it matters not that no one is engaging in the targeted behavior. We’ve got to protect the children from a host of potential threats, although the evidence of that potentiality can hardly fill a Post-It note.
The danger — and maybe intent? — is that earnest efforts at teaching American history, warts and all, may be curtailed. Teaching, many will agree, is a incredibly undervalued profession. Our Legislature and governor, even while villainizing teachers generally as practitioners of political indoctrination, nonetheless appears prepared to deliver them raises in this session. But many educators also want to steer clear of controversy, whether that’s before local school boards or just facing an irate parent.
How many times have conservatives complained that schools have overreacted to litigated limits on religious advocacy within public schools by banning, either directly or just through hypersensitivity, the inclusion of a Christmas tree in school decorations? And yet, some lawmakers outfit themselves in the armor of righteousness with loud and public attacks on “indoctrination” that isn’t happening, all the while adding pressure that will convince some teachers to steer clear of teaching uncomfortable but accurate truths about the way the nation has treated Black people and other minority groups.
CRT has become the buzz word for any teachings about race and the United States’ struggles with it that might upset a parent or a school board member. It’s an inaccurate buzz word, but one that’s accepted by too many who stand ready to make it a culture war battleground.
Lawmakers are also leaping at the chance to inject state government into the business of local school districts on the issue of transgender kids using school bathrooms. This is not a major issue in Arkansas, although the gnashing of teeth in Little Rock suggests otherwise. But aren’t local school boards elected precisely to put representatives of the community in place to handle these matters?
Rep. Mary Bentley of Perryville, sponsor of the bathroom legislation, has said she was inspired to draft her bill after the Conway School Board passed a bathroom policy designed to keep transgender students from using a bathroom that doesn’t match
their gender at birth. OK, so in Conway, that’s how they want to handle it, and they did. Why should the state Legislature now step in to force every other school board in the state to follow Conway’s policies?
Does “local control” only apply so long as the locals don’t do anything that upsets state legislators? The answer, as the Magic 8 Ball says, appears to be “yes.”
What’s really at play with these types of bills is a nationally organized political agenda by what passes for conservative lawmakers today. Lawmakers attend conferences and come home with so-called “model legislation” that pops up in GOP-controlled state houses across the country. It doesn’t matter if it’s not a prevailing issue in each state; it helps solidify a national political strategy.
We can hope that as the legislative session grows older, lawmakers can turn their attention to the realities of Arkansas’ situation promoting economic development, deploying broadband farther and wider, raising teacher salaries, strengthening public schools, dealing with prisons and incarceration, and on and on.
Let’s get back to the substantive issues really affecting the lives of everyday Arkansans.