Kathy Webb was the first openly gay person in elected office in Arkansas. She served in the state House of Representatives from 2007 to 2013. When I interviewed her in 2017, she talked about
working with other legislators across fierce disagreements:
One of the issues that had been most important to me in my late 20s and early 30s was the Equal Rights Amendment. I'm very passionate about equal rights for women. In 1982 a friend and I organized the last rally for the ERA in Arkansas on the steps of the capitol.
So here fast forward all these years later, I'm a sitting legislator. My first term, the ERA is brought up. And the internal emotion is very strong, to think that after all the years that I worked on the ERA I might have a chance to vote on it as a legislator.
Well, it was sent to a particular committee, and
it failed to get out of the committee by one vote
. And the one vote that it needed was cast against it by a woman who was a Democrat. I felt all sorts of emotion
—
anger, disappointment, all of that.
The woman and I were working together on another project. And I needed her support, and she needed my support. I took a walk around the capitol, and I thought about it. And I thought,
I don't want to say something that's driven by my emotion right now
, rather than reason. And, of course, a lot of politics is driven by emotion.
But I just made a point to avoid being around her for about 24 hours until I really thought it through. And I said, ok, this was one vote. It didn't happen. You're not going to get to vote on it.
There are a lot of other issues that you care about, and you're going to just move forward.
And that's what I tried to do.
