This Tuesday, Mississippi will vote on a pro-life constitutional amendment:
- "Initiative #26 would amend the Mississippi Constitution to define the word 'person' or 'persons', as those terms are used in Article III of the state constitution, to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof."
Can you imagine the same question being asked on an Illinois ballot?
Mississippi is a pro-life state, and Mississippi's leading elected officials are all supporting Initiative 26. Illinois is a pro-abortion state, with all of Illinois' leading elected officials -except pro-life State Treasurer Dan Rutherford - being outspoken proponents of abortion-on-demand. That leadership includes all four of the leaders in the Illinois General Assembly - the Catholic House Speaker Mike Madigan, Senate President John Cullerton and Republican chamber leaders Senator Christine Radogno and House Minority Leader Tom Cross - who have consistently opposed protecting unborn humans.
Illinois' political leadership would oppose an initiative like Mississippi's which declares human life begins at conception. We're not sure when life actually begins in the minds of Illinois political leaders, because it took several tries and embarrassingly strong wording concessions to radical pro-abortion lobbyists and lawmakers for the Illinois legislature to finally pass a law protecting helpless newborns born alive.
Those leaders can't seem to do anything to protect unborn humans at any stage while they find ways to fund protecting malicious child molestors at Planned Parenthood clinics. They can't get a license plate that extols adoption, can't regulate abortion clinic conditions and even though the way has been cleared legally, they still can't seem to find a way to notify parents when their 12 year olds are getting abortions.
But in Mississippi, Initiative 26 and "its 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," Personhood USA's legal analyst Gualberto Garcia Jones writes in USA Today.
The question that Barack Obama claimed was above his pay grade is the question that Mississippians will answer Tuesday: Just when does human life begin?
With Illinois' political leadership climate like it is right now, we Illinoisans should be thankful the question won't be on our ballot next spring. Because if it was, thousands of unborn babies in the wombs of their Illinois-living mothers would likely be denied their personhood, once again.
