My life

As soon as the movie bill died, Arlo came up with another gem: a $1,500-a-year tax on every couple in Arkansas who lived together without benefit of wedlock. The headline alarm bell went off in my brain again: “Clinton Comes Out for Living in Sin!” I went to see Representative Tyer on this one. “Arlo,” I asked, “how long do a man and a woman have to cohabit to pay this tax? A year, a month, a week? Or is a one-night stand enough?” “You know, I hadn’t thought about that,” he replied. “And what about enforcement?” I went on. “Are you and I going to get baseball bats and knock down doors to see who’s doing what with whom?” Arlo shrugged and said, “I hadn’t thought about that either. Maybe I better pull that bill down.” I walked back to my office relieved to have dodged another bullet. To my surprise, some of my staff seemed disappointed. A couple of them had decided they wanted the bill to pass and our office to enforce it. They had even imagined their new uniforms: T-shirts emblazoned with the acronym SNIF, for Sex No-no Investigation Force.

We had a tougher time when it came to gay rights. Two years earlier, Attorney General Jim Guy Tucker had spearheaded a new criminal code through the legislature. It simplified and clarified the definitions of more than one hundred years of complicated and overlapping crimes. It also eliminated so-called status offenses, which had been condemned by the Supreme Court. A crime requires committing a forbidden act, intentionally or recklessly; just being something society deems undesirable isn’t enough. For example, being a drunk wasn’t a crime. Neither was being a homosexual, though it had been before the new code was adopted.

Representative Bill Stancil took a lot of heat from the conservative pastors in his hometown of Fort Smith for his vote in favor of the revised criminal code. They said he had voted to legalize homosexuality. Stancil was a good man who had been one of Arkansas’ best high school football coaches. He was a muscular, square-jawed, broken-nosed guy, and subtlety wasn’t his strong point. He couldn’t believe he had voted for homosexuality and was determined to rectify his error before the religious right could punish him for it, so he introduced a bill to make homosexual acts a crime. For good measure, he criminalized bestiality too, causing one of his wittier colleagues to remark that he obviously didn’t have many farmers in his district. Stancil’s bill described in excruciating detail every conceivable variation of both kinds of forbidden intercourse. A pervert could read it and escape the urge to buy pornographic material for a whole week.

There was no way to beat the bill on a direct vote. Moreover, the Supreme Court was a long way from its 2003 decision declaring that consensual homosexual relations are protected by the right to privacy, so getting an opinion from me saying the bill was unconstitutional wasn’t an option. The only possible strategy was to delay the bill to death. In the House, three young liberals who were great allies of mine—

Kent Rubens, Jody Mahoney, and Richard Mays—decided to offer an interesting amendment. Word got out that something was afoot, and I joined a packed gallery above the House chamber to watch the fireworks go off. One of the guys rose and praised Stancil’s bill, saying it was about time someone stood up for morality in Arkansas. The only problem, he said, was that the bill was too weak, and he wanted to offer a “little amendment” to strengthen it. Then, with a straight face, he proposed the addition, making it a Class D felony for any member of the legislature to commit adultery in Little Rock while the legislature was in session.

The entire gallery was engulfed in peals of laughter. On the floor, however, the silence was deafening. For many legislators from small towns, coming to Little Rock for the session was the only fun they had

—the equivalent of two months in Paris. They were not amused, and several of them told the three wise guys they’d never pass another bill unless the amendment was withdrawn. It was. The bill sailed through and was sent to the Senate.