Voting Matters

What Matters Most………..Commentary by Jim High

Last week the voters of Mississippi said “NO” to the Personhood Amendment and many Mississippians breathed a sigh of relief that maybe, just maybe, it is a sign that Mississippi has turned the corner, and can now begin to address the issues that matter and that will begin to move our state forward instead of backwards.  Regardless of your opinion for or against the Personhood Amendment two things need to be said and understood loud and clear.

First, it was a very poorly thought out piece of legislation and for that reason had it passed it would have brought many unintended consequences to a great many women and their families.  This is probably the major reason that it lost.  So we should learn from this how important it is to get proposed legislation right before it becomes law.  A lot of the problems we face in our country are due to the unintended consequences of poorly thought out and constructed laws, that might correct one problem, but cause many other unintended  problems.  And then we complicate this problem by passing even more laws instead of backing up and starting over.

Sometimes issues are so emotional and ideological that reason, logic and sometimes even justice go out the window.  We can and should prevent that by thinking laws through completely in advance.  The voters of Mississippi proved themselves worthy of thinking in advance when they voted down Prop No. 26.  And we are all better off because rational thinking matters.  Voters around the country seem to be getting the message also because last Tuesday many elections overturned laws that the majority did not like and did not want, like the law in Ohio to strip public union workers of their collective bargaining rights, and the various recall elections held in several states.

The second thing last week’s defeat of Prop No. 26 should tell the people of Mississippi, and the nation for that matter, is that issues that are purely religion based have no place being enacted into law in a nation founded on the principal of separation of church and state.  This is becoming all the more important as our great nation continues to become the melting pot of free people from around the globe that it has always been, and was intended to be from the very beginning. 

As I was growing up in Tupelo in the 1940’s and 1950’s we only had Protestant and Catholic Christian Churches and a very small group of Jewish people.  And we were all either white or black.  Look at Tupelo today; it is very different.  We have a Muslim Religious and Community Center, a Temple for the Hindu faith, an Eastern Orthodox Church, large numbers of Latin American Catholics, and also many new people from Japan and other Asian countries.  In addition the Christian churches now come in an almost endless variety both inside major denominations, and as completely independent stand alone congregations. 

With all this diversity it should be perfectly clear that the religious beliefs of any of these different faiths and their particular beliefs, whatever they are, should not be codified into the laws of our city, county, state or nation.  Freedom of and from religion needs to be maintained as an inviolate principal of the United States of America.  If we are not tolerant of others regardless of their faith and beliefs, how can we ever expect to live in peace with one another?  And isn’t living together as one people, one nation, and one world what the human condition is all about.  I believe that it is.

Our world continues to grow and evolve.  There are now 7,000,000,000 of us on planet Earth.  We evolved over hundreds of thousands of years from separate small tribes, and we all still have our tribal mentality, but we must learn to lay it aside and recognize the humanity in all people, knowing that everyone is our brother, our neighbor, and that we are all our brother’s and our neighbor’s keeper.  That is the future.  That is the take away lesson from last Tuesday’s elections, not just here in Mississippi, but all around the country.

What Matters Most…………VOTING MATTERS.

© 2011 #23  Jim High can be reached at P. O. Box 467, Tupelo, MS 38802-0467