MS: Are Gunn, House leaders afraid to let Mississippians vote on abortion?

[RandySF]

In 2012, his first year as speaker of the Mississippi House, Philip Gunn authored a resolution that would have made abortion illegal under the state constitution.

House Concurrent Resolution 83 read, in part, “to provide that nothing in the (state) Constitution shall be construed to grant to any person the right to choose to have an abortion.”

The resolution would have given Mississippians an opportunity to vote on the hot button issue of abortion.

But Mississippians never got the opportunity to vote. The resolution died in the House Constitution Committee when it was not taken up for consideration.

Perhaps it died because Gunn was afraid of how Mississippians would vote. At least that is what it looks like now. Speaker Gunn’s House has passed a proposal to restore the state’s initiative process that allows citizens to gather signatures to bypass the Legislature and place issues on the ballot for the electorate to decide. But under the legislation that passed first the Constitution Committee and later the full House, the initiative cannot be used to place abortion on the ballot.



https://mississippitoday.org/2023/03/12/philip-gunn-house-abortion-ballot-initiative/

[Haggard Celine]

1. Mississippi is seen as one of the most conservative states,

but they're more libertarian than anything else. They really don't like laws of any kind, except for laws that expand personal freedom. We voted for medical cannabis, even though the government made the process on the ballot as confusing as possible. So we passed the referendum with around 65-70% of the vote.

So what happened then? They decided to fight it, and the state supreme court struck it down on some technicality. The people were incensed, so the legislature began talking about passing the law with the changes. It's still about 2.5 years since the election and we have no bill to pass it.

Mississippi is a conservative state, but not as much as people think. Our biggest problems are our state government and lack of voter participation. I think that cannabis referendum was passed because a lot of people who don't vote, or who rarely vote, went to vote on cannabis. I think we could pass a referendum to make cannabis legal for everyone old enough to buy it. I think we'd pass a law to make abortion legal too, if we got the chance to vote.

Our legislature and our governor need to be voted out in the worst way. Same goes for our supreme court, which is elected here. And people need to vote! Participation is the key to change in the South. I'm waiting for our government to do something that will cause enough anger to get people in the voting booth. I think Stacey Abrams showed us how to do it.