It’s great to live in America, a place where our two-party system allows you to align yourself politically with someone who sort of agrees with you a lot of the time, and then voting them into office where they’ll hopefully make decisions and laws that reflect what you believe is best for the country. If you live in Mississippi, you have a choice in the upcoming governor’s race — you can vote for someone who thinks that zygotes are fully human and deserve the same rights as full grown women, or you can vote for someone else who believes the same thing.
Both Phil Bryant, Republican, and Johnny Dupree, Democrat agree that Initiative 26, also known as the “Personhood Amendment,” should be ratified. This also means that both Bryant and Dupree believe that all abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, that the morning after pill literally kills babies, that IUD’s and some other forms of hormonal birth control shouldn’t be legal, and women with ectopic pregnancy that implants in the Fallopian tubes is just like having a teeny weeny human perched where they don’t belong and that harming it would be wrong. Also, that you look fat in those pants.
Republican Bryant explained his views at a Yes to 26 rally earlier this year.
They can become pregnant as often as they want to, if that’s the question. Now, if your question is do they have the right to an abortion? What we’re saying is that child has certainly his rights and her rights, too. So, if we are going to define them as a human being, certainly it is impossible for us – for me or others in this government – to deny that human being as he exists or she exists, those basic human rights. And I do not have the right as one human being to take the life of another.
Oh, goody goody gumdrops! Women have the right to become pregnant as often as we want to. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Southern Male Republican gubernatorial candidate, for the permission to get knocked up, just as much as my little sweet ladyheart desires.
But don’t worry, other people who believe in cell clump rights! The Democratic hopeful has your back as well. When asked to explain his views, Johnny Dupree said,
The reason I have to say that is because my wife and I were pregnant when we married. We were teenagers. We married. Didn’t abort. We married. My daughter who we didn’t abort has a 4-year-old son. He is an in vitro baby. So, can you see why? Personhood … starts at fertilization. If we didn’t feel that way, we wouldn’t have had our baby. And if we felt that way, I wouldn’t have my grandbaby.
No, I’m sorry, Johnny Dupree. I fail to see how your feelings about your shotgun wedding or test tube grandbaby has anything to do with every single other woman’s uterus in your entire state. When told that the Personhood amendment would actually affect other people’s possible future in vitro grandbabies in a pretty serious way, he said that was something they’d address down the road.
Initiative 26 will come to a vote on the general election on November 8. In the meantime, several doctors’ groups have come out in opposing the measure based on actual science that counters the “beliefs” of the two candidates for governor.
Mississippi currently boasts the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the US as well as one of the highest poverty rates. The state also suffers from a greater percentage of obese residents than any other state, is currently facing a budget crisis, and receives much more money from the federal government’s tax coffers than it pays in. But you know what will fix these problems? Babies. Babies will save Mississippi like how babies always save shitty marriages.
Get it the fuck together, Mississippi.
Analysis: Miss Gov Candidates Back ‘Personhood’ [NECN]