In the News

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/08/mississippi-personhood-law_n_10…

ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS, The Associated Press

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The questions on the ballot range from undocumented immigration and union rights to President Obama’s health care law. The answers from voters could offer valuable insight into the temperament of the American public.

Voters across the nation will decide a host of statewide initiatives Tuesday and elect governors in Mississippi and Kentucky – choices that may point to political prospects for 2012, when an additional 10 governorships and the presidency are up for grabs.

In both states, the chief executive offices are expected to stay in the hands of incumbent parties, perhaps indicating that people aren’t ready to abandon their loyalties, despite the nation’s stubbornly weak economy.

Tuesday’s election will be voters’ last major judgment of the year. But regardless of the referendums and races, experts agree that economic woes will be the most important factor in 2012.

“If the economy were to turn around in the next year, that’s going to matter a lot more than what happens in ballot issues,” said political analyst Justin Buchler.

Lawmakers have tried to tie other issues, such as public employees’ union rights, to their states’ economic struggles.

In battleground Ohio, voters will decide whether to repeal a law severely limiting the collective bargaining rights of more than 350,000 teachers, firefighters, police officers and other public employees, and whether to prohibit people from being required to buy health insurance as part of the national health care overhaul.

A vote against the health care law would be mostly symbolic, but Republican opponents of the measure hope to use the vote as part of a legal challenge.

Recent polls suggest voters are leaning toward rejection of the collective bargaining law, but the final tally could be close. If approved, it would permit workers to negotiate on wages but not on pensions or health care benefits. It also bans public-worker strikes, scraps binding arbitration and eliminates annual pay raises for teachers.

The vote will be a referendum on both Republican backers and GOP Gov. John Kasich, who pushed strongly for the legislation. The outcome will also be closely watched by presidential candidates as a gauge of the Ohio electorate, which is seen as a bellwether.

No Republican has won the White House without Ohio, and only two Democrats did so in more than a century.

The governors’ races will be closely watched by both parties, since governors can marshal resources and get-out-the-vote efforts crucial to any White House candidate.

In Mississippi, Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant appears poised to keep the governor’s mansion in GOP hands, succeeding Haley Barbour, who toyed briefly with a run for president. Hattiesburg Mayor Johnny Dupree is the first black major-party nominee for governor in Mississippi, but an upset win for him isn’t in the cards.

In Kentucky, Democratic incumbent Gov. Steve Beshear is waltzing to re-election despite high unemployment, budget shortfalls and an onslaught of third-party attack ads.

Tuesday’s election comes just weeks after two other governors’ races. Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal won 66 percent of the vote last month in the state’s open primary, more than enough to avoid a recount. And in West Virginia, Democrat Earl Ray Tomblin narrowly beat Republican Bill Maloney in a special election.

Political analyst Alan Rosenthal says voters are so polarized today – with fewer crossing party lines – that choosing a candidate is a better indication of the public’s mood than deciding a ballot question.

Picking sides on a referendum may reinforce party loyalty, but “it’s not going to be as clear as when you’re voting for a candidate,” said Rosenthal, a Rutgers University professor.

Social issues are also on the ballot. In Mississippi, one referendum asks whether the state should define life as beginning at conception. The measure stands a decent chance of becoming the first victory in the country for the so-called personhood movement, which aims to make abortion all but illegal.

Similar attempts have failed in Colorado and are under way elsewhere.

Also in Mississippi, a proposed constitutional amendment would prohibit the government from taking private property by eminent domain and transferring it to other people.

In Arizona, Republican state Sen. Russell Pearce, architect of the immigration law that thrust the issue into the national political debate, faces a recall that could throw him out of office. The Republican attempting to defeat him has made immigration a constant theme, but Pearce has a 3-to-1 fundraising advantage.

Other votes of note:

_ In Kentucky, comic-turned-politician Robert Farmer upset local residents with some hillbilly jokes, but he could ride name recognition to a new job as agricultural commissioner. In Ohio, politically incorrect comedian Drew Hastings, a “Comedy Central” fixture, is running for mayor of tiny Hillsboro.

_ In Maine, voters will decide whether to repeal a new state law that requires voters to register at least two days before an election. A repeal would effectively restore Election Day voter registration, which had been available for nearly four decades. Maine has two other ballot questions asking residents whether they want to allow casinos in specific communities.

_ New Jersey voters are being asked whether to legalize sports betting in a measure polls indicate will likely pass. But it won’t change much since New Jersey is among the vast majority of states subject to a federal ban on sports betting.

_ In Philadelphia, Democratic incumbent Michael Nutter is expected to win easy re-election.

_ In Washington state, voters decide whether to end the state-run liquor system and allow large stores to sell liquor. The effort has been bankrolled by giant retailer Costco, which spent more than $22 million to make it the costliest initiative in Washington history.

_ Oregon is holding a special primary to replace Democratic Rep. David Wu, who resigned his seat in August after a newspaper published allegations that he had an unwanted sexual encounter with an 18-year-old woman. Wu was the fourth member of Congress to quit this year in the wake of a sex scandal.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57319403/mississippi-votes-when-do…

(CBS News)

JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI - Les Riley draws on his religious convictions to explain why he led the petition drive that put Mississippi’s “Personhood Amendment” on the state ballot.

“We believe God has already told us that life begins at conception,” Riley said in an interview. “We believe this is the right thing to do legally and politically, but we also believe this is the right thing to do morally.”

Two years ago, Riley began collecting signatures for Statewide Initiative 26, which runs just twenty-one words: “Should the term ‘person’ be defined to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the equivalent thereof?”

The drive needed 89-thousand names to qualify for the ballot, and obtained 106,000 certified signatures.

As the citizen-sponsor of “Personhood,” Riley says his motivation was love. “Because Christ loved me when I didn’t deserve it, I love my neighbors, born, unborn, mothers, even our enemies.”

Riley lives in the rural town of Hickory Flat, outside Tupelo, and has ten children with his wife - nine biological and one adopted. If you ask him whether the intent of “Personhood” is to outlaw all abortions, his answer is direct: Yes, with no exceptions.

Debating Mississippi’s “Personhood Amendment”
Doctors call Mississippi “personhood” initiative dangerous
Haley Barbour “concerned” about Mississippi anti-abortion amendment

When it comes to rape, Riley says, “We don’t have the death penalty in Mississippi for rape. Why would we punish the rapist’s child?” As for incest, he points to a recent case in Mississippi when a couple allegedly covered up a pregnancy caused by incest with an abortion. Riley says, “Was that girl protected by legal abortion or was she harmed further by it?”

“This initiative scares me to death,” said Cristen Hemmins, a mother of three who lives in Oxford, Mississippi. She was raped at gunpoint 20 years ago on her college campus by two men who shot her in the back and leg as she ran away. Though hospitalized for weeks, she made a full recovery.

“People on the ‘yes’ side keep saying to me, ‘Well, don’t punish the baby, punish the rapist.’ But what they leave out of that equation is me,” Hemmins said in an interview. “If this had been in place, and I had gotten pregnant, I wouldn’t have had any options. I would have been forced by the state government to bear a child, which might have killed me, physically, if not emotionally.”

Hemmins, who joined Mississippians for Healthy Families, which opposes initiative 26, worries that if it passes, anti-abortion activists will persuade the state legislature to ban all abortions in Mississippi and certain forms of birth control, such as the so-called “morning after” pill.

“A lot of people on the ‘yes’ side think that if you get pregnant through rape that God meant for that to happen, and that you should carry it to full term, and having had three children, I know that pregnancy is no easy ride, and birthing is no easy ride,” Hemmins said. “So the people who say that there are families lining up to adopt children, I point them to the 1,300 people that are in foster care today [in Mississippi].”

Mississippi’s “Personhood Amendment” is part of a new national strategy to restrict a woman’s ability to obtain a legal abortion. The measure has failed twice before in Colorado.

Activists are pursuing efforts to put the initiative on the ballot in at least nine other states next year, including the key presidential battlegrounds of Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, and again, Colorado, as well as California, Montana, North Dakota, Arkansas, and Alabama, according to Keith Ashley, of Personhood USA.

Ashley points to nascent activity in six other states, citing potential citizen-led drives in Nevada, Nebraska, Oregon, Oklahoma, and legislative efforts being sponsored in Michigan and Kansas.

The Mississippi debate finds doctors on both sides. Beverly McMillan, a retired obstetrician-gynecologist, helped open the state’s first abortion clinic in 1975, but quit doing abortions after three years.

“I lost my stomach for it,” McMillan said in an interview. She believes human life begins at conception and is now president of Mississippi Pro-Life. “It is not ethical to kill a human being because they are inconvenient or unwanted or what we consider burdensome to us,” she said.

Past anti-abortion campaigns in Mississippi have been successful. For example, a woman seeking an abortion is required to wait 24-hours after scheduling an appointment, and she must be given the opportunity to see her sonogram.

While there were once seven locations offering legal abortions, there is only one such clinic left in the state, in Jackson, the capital. In 1991, there were approximately 7,000 abortions annually in Mississippi; in 2008, there were less than 3,000, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Dr. McMillan says, “The purpose of Amendment 26 is to recognize what is biologically and scientifically true — that human life begins at the moment of fertilization and has personhood from that moment and should be protected by the law like we protect our newborn babies.”

But the Mississippi Medical Association opposes “Personhood” because, doctors say, it would bring unprecedented government interference with their work. Infertility specialist Randall Hines says the amendment is based on flawed science.

“Only about 20 percent of fertilized eggs, actually, go on to become children,” Hines said in an interview. “I think to suggest that legal rights should be given to every fertilized egg is a mistake.”

Dr. Hines fears enforcement of the amendment could rein in standard medical practices, such as surgical and pharmaceutical treatment for an ectopic pregnancy, when a fertilized egg grows outside a woman’s uterus, typically in the fallopian tube.

“If that pregnancy continues to grow, it can rupture and kill the woman,” Hines said. “By ending the life of the ectopic pregnancy, I would be committing homicide.”

One of Hines’ patients is Atlee Breeland, from Brandon, Miss., who was once diagnosed with infertility and used in-vitro fertilization to conceive her twin girls, now five-years-old.

“When I want medical advice, I want to get that from my doctor. I don’t necessarily think that the legislature and the judges of the Mississippi are in the best position and have the best background to decide how my physician ought to practice medicine,” Breeland said.

Breeland founded Parents Against 26, worried that the amendment could roll back medical options at home. “I don’t want Mississippians to have to go Washington, DC or New York or California to have infertility treatment. I want to get treated for my disease right here.”

It may comes as a surprise that a church that teaches “life begins at conception” appears neutral on “Personhood.” But Roman Catholic Bishop Joseph Latino, head of the diocese of Jackson, said in an interview, “We have neither condemned, nor have we sponsored the amendment.”

Bishop Latino is concerned that inevitable legal challenges to a state “Personhood Amendment” would delay long-time efforts to overturn “Roe v. Wade,” the 38-year-old Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.

“The Roe v. Wade decision is a federal decision. A state decision is obviously a state decision. Now if you playing bridge, who trumps?” Bishop Latino said.

Still, “Personhood” proponents, like Terri Herring, see an opportunity to outlaw all abortions in Mississippi now.

“Will America step to the plate and begin to frame its laws in such a way that we protect unborn children?” Herring said in an interview. “We can say that there are times when an egg does not implant, but I think there’s a difference in whether that child is conceived and intentionally destroyed versus nature takes its course.”

In Tuesday’s statewide election, both candidates for governor, Republican Paul Bryant and Democrat Johnny Dupree, say they support “Personhood.”

Sponsor Les Riley and “Personhood” backers say they reject old legal arguments about when a fetus is viable. After all, he asked, can a newborn live without a mother or could a two-year-old live in the woods by herself with nobody to take care of her?

“When 23 chromosomes from your mother, 23 from your father, came together and created a unique DNA molecule,” Riley said, “you were exactly the person you are now, and nothing has been added to you except time and food.”

Mississippi attempts to define the start of personhood

Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/11/07/4035984/mississippi-attempts-to-define….

By RICHARD FAUSSET
Los Angeles Times
By RICHARD FAUSSET
Last modified: 2011-11-07T14:29:55Z
Published: Monday, Nov. 7, 2011 - 6:29 am
Copyright 2011 . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

CLARKSDALE, Miss. — Gail Giaramita was walking door-to-door in this old cotton town on a recent afternoon, genially informing voters about the simple choice they faced when it came to Initiative 26, the statewide ballot measure that would define personhood as beginning at the moment of fertilization.

“If you believe that the unborn are human beings, you need to vote yes,” Giaramita explained to W.L. Wilkins, proprietor of Big Mama’s grocery store. “If you believe that women should continue to have the right to abort their babies, you need to vote no.”

If that’s all there was to it - if Initiative 26 would simply ban all abortions, even in cases of rape or incest - this proposed amendment to the state Constitution would be controversial enough. But opponents of the measure are warning of other potential consequences, including a ban on many birth control pills and a severe hampering of popular infertility treatments.

Proponents call these charges untrue “scare tactics.”

Either way, the measure’s passage would count as an unprecedented attempt to nullify the abortion right granted under Roe v. Wade. Personhood USA, the main supporter of the Mississippi measure, says a victory here could “change (the) abortion debate,” as part of a “larger, global movement to define when life begins in an effort to undercut the case for legalized abortion.”

At the same time, however, many observers, including some key antiabortion activists, expect the initiative to be immediately challenged in federal court, and probably struck down, with new rulings that may end up strengthening the hand of abortion supporters.

Among the doubters is Joseph Latino, the Roman Catholic bishop of Jackson, Miss., who has called the personhood effort “noble,” but declined to endorse it, warning that it “could ultimately harm our efforts to overthrow Roe vs. Wade.”

The idea of ending abortion by retooling the state-level legal definition of a person is not new, but it may have its best chance of success in Tuesday’s vote in Mississippi - the most conservative state in the nation, according to a Gallup poll released in February. Both Democratic and Republican candidates for governor and attorney general here support the initiative, and as of last month, the “yes” faction has a substantial fundraising lead on the “no” crowd.

“I think our chances are very good,” said Les Riley, the initiative’s sponsor and founder of the group Personhood Mississippi. “But I don’t believe in chance. I believe in providence.”

In recent years, a number of states have considered and rejected similar proposals, most notably Colorado, where propositions were voted down in 2008 and 2010. Those efforts and the one in Mississippi were backed by Personhood USA, a Colorado-based group that has attracted antiabortion activists fed up with waiting for the U.S. Supreme Court to tilt in their favor.

The group is hoping to put similar initiatives before voters in a number of states next year, including in California, where supporters plan to begin gathering signatures in January, President Keith Mason said.

In Mississippi, the initiative’s opponents are characterizing it as a case of government overreach, in apparent deference to the state’s conservative tenor.

One TV ad from the “vote no” group Mississippians for Healthy Families features a rape victim who says the initiative goes “too far.”

“It’s perfectly acceptable to be pro-life and against Initiative 26,” she says.

Though few top state politicians of either party have criticized the initiative, medical groups have. The Mississippi State Medical Association has warned that if the initiative passes, doctors could be charged with murder or wrongful death for “employing techniques physicians have used for years.”

The Mississippi Nurses Association has said that some birth controls pills could become illegal, because the hormones they contain not only prevent ovulation, they might also prevent a fertilized egg from implanting into the uterus.

A group called Parents Against MS 26 argues that in vitro fertilization would be essentially rendered ineffective because the initiative could ban the freezing of leftover embryos created as part of the IVF process. The American Society of Reproductive Medicine has stated that the initiative would “thwart the ability of those who suffer from infertility to seek treatment appropriate to their disease.”

The group Yes on 26 has called these and other concerns “scare tactics” promulgated by national groups such as Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union. The initiative, proponents say, would not ban in vitro fertilization per se, only the destruction of unused embryos. Doctors, they say, would not be prevented from saving the life of a woman during a problematic pregnancy. And they promise that “most forms” of birth control pills would not be banned.

If passed, the interpretation of the law would not be up to the initiative’s authors, but to the courts, and possibly the state Legislature, said I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law professor who has been following the issue.

On the streets of Clarksdale, Giaramita, a 56-year-old volunteer for the Yes on 26 campaign, made her case with the sweet, Bible-based style she honed in 2010; she had bid for a congressional seat as a member of the conservative Constitution Party but lost.

She tried to keep her message focused on abortion, and found a largely receptive audience as she passed out handbills with a photo of a fetus and the message, “Give me a chance. I am a person.”

She had the vote of Oliver Hicks Jr., a retired carpenter who gave her a hearty “Amen” as she made her pitch.

Hicks said God did not want us to kill “unborn kids.” As for the other issues? “That’s just something they’re saying,” he said.

James Bopp Jr., an attorney and well-known antiabortion activist, has outlined what he believes to be the most likely legal fate of a personhood amendment like Mississippi’s: A federal circuit court would strike it down. An appellate court would uphold the decision. And the Supreme Court would decline to review it.

The only ones who would gain in that scenario, he argues, would be the opponents’ lawyers, who would collect statutory attorney’s fees from the state.

“The effort will have enriched the pro-abortion forces for no gain for the pro-life side,” he wrote in an influential 2007 memo on personhood amendments, which he said still reflected his position on the issue. “In fact, there will be a loss because there will be yet another federal court decision declaring that state law on abortion is superseded by the federal Constitution.”

The Liberty Counsel, a conservative public-interest law firm, has argued that it is “by no means certain” that a lower court would find a personhood amendment unconstitutional. The group sees “no alternative to a personhood approach that offers any chance of ending abortion in the foreseeable future.”

Brad Prewitt, executive director of the Yes on 26 campaign, said supporters can’t worry about how things will shake out in the federal courts. Rather, he said, they need to focus on what’s right.

Giaramita, traipsing between lawns in Clarksdale, agreed.

“This is not an intellectual decision,” she said. “This is not a political decision. It’s a moral decision.”

Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/11/07/4035984/mississippi-attempts-to-define….

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/story/2011-11-06/personhood-Mississ…

By Gualberto Garcia Jones

Increasingly, the American people are being treated paternalistically by a government, media and public sector elite that stands in direct opposition to our traditional American values.

Using the courts as its instrument, this American elite has emasculated a once independent America.

The Constitution, a document written to prevent tyranny, has, as Thomas Jefferson predicted, become “a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist, and shape into any form they please.”
No greater example exists of this abuse of raw judicial power than Roe v. Wade, a decision by seven unelected men to impose abortion on all 50 states.

Tuesday, Mississippi will vote on a pro-life constitutional amendment, Initiative 26, that declares that all human beings are persons entitled to the protection of their rights.

Mississippi is a pro-life state, and Mississippi’s leading elected officials are all supporting Initiative 26. This includes the current governor, Haley Barbour®, and both candidates for governor: Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant® and Hattiesburg Mayor Johnny Dupree (D); as well as Attorney General Jim Hood (D), Sen. Roger Wicker® and Reps. Alan Nunnelee®, Greg Harper® and Steven Palazzo®.

This simple amendment has become ground zero in the fight over abortion because it challenges not only the legal foundation of Roe v. Wade— that the child in the womb is a non-person — but also the source of the power that has allowed the liberal elite to reshape America in its own image.

As a result, the people of Mississippi have become the target of an unrelenting campaign of scare tactics and doomsday predictions from abortion proponents.

These scare tactics are exposed by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, which concluded in its legal analysis that Initiative 26 will not ban birth control or in vitro fertilization, nor criminalize lifesaving medical treatment or accidental deaths.

To date, 55 million innocent human beings have been killed by abortion. Tuesday, in the sovereign state of Mississippi, men and women will vote to put an end to it in their state by voting yes on 26.

Gualberto Garcia Jones is a director of, and legal analyst for, Personhood USA, a group that opposes abortion and seeks to establish that the legal definition of “person” begins at fertilization.