State of This Union — President’s Message
One advantage leaders can have is anything they do or say seems important. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement and held a press event July 14 announcing that the “First Liberty Institute’s Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy’s Religious Liberty in the States index” found that Arkansas Ranks Number 1 for Religious Liberty.
Doesn’t the First Amendment for all states begin, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
When this pseudo-event appeared on news feeds, a memory flashed. Among my duties as a journalist in small newspapers years ago, I compiled press releases about local businesses. When one would raise some doubt, we’d check. Early on, I opened one from an auto body shop heralding it had been ranked in the top 5 of some group.
Being an obscure professional association, I dug, learning some business associations exist whose purpose is to promote their members, for a fee, by proclaiming some rating or award to gain free publicity in the local news media as well as sending a certificate to hang on their waiting room walls. There are real associations of fender unbenders of course, and the ethical newspaper would edit up the legitimate news releases.
In the not-that-distant past, anyone who’d had a public school Civics or Government class would presume that a top ranking in religious liberty referred to welcoming the widest variety of religious beliefs and practices.
“I signed Act 677 last year, protecting individuals who hold religious views on the fundamental biological differences between men and women,” Sanders said the other day. “And I signed the Conscience Protection Act in 2023, ensuring Arkansans are free to live and work according to their faith. At the same time, thanks to the law I signed last year, we began placing copies of the Ten Commandments in classrooms and state buildings.”
The First Liberty Institute is generally described as a “nonprofit Christian conservative legal organization.”
It’s not the American Civil Liberties Union, whose Arkansas chapter responded, in part: “… [S]tate leaders continue to push policies that privilege certain religious beliefs, mandate religious displays in public schools, censor books, and target LGBTQ people and other marginalized communities. The government does not protect religious liberty by elevating one set of religious beliefs over everyone else’s.”
Essentially all the established news media in the state fell for the ol’ Best Body Shop gambit.
This was news of a sort, but why did they all run it prominently? While many reports included the ACLU response and other balancing quotes, those paragraphs were placed fairly low, except for the Arkansas Times.
In a meeting a couple of months ago, Arkansas Education Association President April Reisma asked a few of us, “Why should someone join a labor union?” I popped out with: “To help level the playing field.”
We employees want to be treated fairly. Also, protecting and improving public education — both K-12 and higher ed — faces an uneven field in recent years.
“Level playing field,” though, makes no sense. Organized sports always have flat fields or courts. (The CommA Razorback Stadium — formally CommunityAmerica Credit Union Razorback Stadium — has no flaws.) Rich parents might spring for a bulldozer, but otherwise children manage to play despite hillocks and midfield bushes of their own yards.
Its Wikipedia entry finds teams switching sides periodically comes closest to a literal meaning, but “a level playing field is a concept about fairness, not that each person has an equal chance to succeed, but that they all play by the same set of rules resulting in formal equality of opportunity.”
The Wiki corollary stunned me, “Handicapping might be thought of as the opposite concept, of unequal rules designed to make the outcome of play more equal.”
Once again, “Why should someone join a labor union?” Collective action is a bulldozer.
©2026 Ben S. Pollock
This column first was published in the July 2026 newsletter of UA-Fayetteville Education Association / Local 965. Ben Pollock is the 2026-2028 president of Local 965.
