By John Brummett
The chairman of the state Republican Party says Arkansas voters need to elect Republicans to the state Legislature to keep an openly declared lesbian from becoming chairman of the Joint Budget Committee.
There are so many things wrong with Doyle Webb’s attack on state Rep. Kathy Webb of Little Rock (no relation, of course) that I couldn’t possibly get to all of them in the usual space. But I’ll make a dent.
First, he asks Arkansas voters to cast ballots strategically, meaning not as an individual choice between two local candidates, but to reverse the partisan imbalance and redirect committee assignments at the state Capitol.
Voters don’t think like that. A few might, but they won’t be nearly enough to swing the outcome of an election. All politics is local, a man famously said.
Anyway, this is tentative. Committee chairmanships won’t be awarded until the next speaker of the House takes office. If the next speaker has any sense, he’ll certainly put the experience, sense of responsibility and ferocious work habits of Kathy Webb in charge of the mostly thankless drudgery that is budget preparation.
Second, Doyle Webb invokes an entirely negative reason to seek office, and voters, generally speaking, will recoil against a campaign that offers nothing more than that. Vote for me, not Joe the Democrat, because of that lesbian of his party over in Little Rock … that’s less than compelling.
All Joe the Democrat would have to do is flash his Baptist bona fides, show a picture of his family and decry the dastardly tactics being used against him.
Third, being gay, whether open or closeted, has nothing at all to do with one’s ability to make a state government budget. A lesbian can be good with numbers.
From the day she won a Democratic primary in central Little Rock, Kathy Webb, an independent businesswoman, started attending budget hearings. In her second term this year, she was a vice chairman of Joint Budget and they cooked up a pretty smart budget — she, that is, working with, among others, co-chairman Sen. Gilbert Baker, that Religious Right Republican from Conway.
Kathy Webb determined that, as the first openly gay person to serve in the state Legislature, she had a special need to prove herself quietly and efficiently in the insular legislative culture. And she has done so.
Doyle Webb should ask Republican state Rep. Rick Green of Van Buren about Kathy Webb. Green says she bountifully provides the two qualities you most need in a legislative colleague: She’ll work hard and she’ll do precisely what she tells you she’ll do.
Fourth, Doyle Webb professes to worry that Kathy Webb might, as Joint Budget chairman, finagle the state budget to get gay marriages going and maybe to let gay people become foster or adoptive parents. But those are matters of constitutional or statutory law, not of budget.
Fifth, Doyle Webb’s pronouncement is nothing more than fear-based exploitation of bigotry and hate. It has nothing to do with anything other than a base appeal to prejudice. It finds the lowest common denominator in Arkansas politics and proceeds there as quickly as possible.
Doyle Webb says he’s talking about how Republicans extol good ol’ Arkansas values. Surely he doesn’t mean helping yourself to a chunk of the will of a dying woman and getting yourself cited for inappropriate professional conduct as a lawyer — to mention a little stain on Doyle’s personal history.
This is an old Democrat-Republican divide in Arkansas. Most of the competent, hard-working insider legislators are nominal Democrats and they tend to emphasize the budget and command of the process.
Republicans, chronically outnumbered, eschew the process and stand over in the corner shouting about their supposed values, by which they mean stopping abortion and keeping gay people from gaining any acceptance
Kathy Webb ought to be speaker of the House. Democrats know they can’t invite that trouble. So the next best thing is to assign her to start early and stay late on the nitty-gritty of the budget.
Republicans should appreciate that arrangement, actually. Kathy Webb will do the hard work so they won’t have to, which will free them to preach and preen about how gay people are bad.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
