[Publisher’s Note]  Barbour: Don’t Marginalize Women

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by Todd Stauffer, Publisher
Dec. 14, 2011

I'm not sure what Gov. Haley Barbour is "running" for now--vice president? chief of staff?--but I was dismayed to read about his recent speech in which he focused on how churches and church leaders need to help stave off "illegitimacy" in Mississippi.

Well, dismayed and bemused. After all, it was reported last week that the fundamental reason that Barbour decided not to run for president was that his "opposition intelligence" was so embarrassing that the staffers assigned to do it didn't want to confront him over it, according to Politico.com.

So to see him fire up a quick "family values tour" has at least a whiff of irony.

"I spoke about this yesterday in Tupelo and set a goal to reduce illegitimate births by half within five years," Barbour said, according to the text of the speech. "The high illegitimacy rate isn't the only negative facing Mississippi's K-12 schools. Yet it does point us in the right direction for improving school results."

Not only did the governor reach into the dark recesses of the 1950s to find the term "illegitimacy" and apply it haphazardly to vast swathes of children in his state, but the governor balanced the rest of his vintage argument on another tottering old political sawhorse--the unwed, teen-aged mother.

According to the governor, 55 percent of the births that take place in Mississippi are "out-of-wedlock, often to teenage girls. This isn't a new problem, but it is a worsening problem. This is everybody's problem," he said.

Which is true and interesting. I agree that there are things to be done on this front.

But what surprises me most about this speech is what the governor didn't say. In fact, there are two words that are completely missing from the text of the speech--I have the press release and did a word search.

Those words are: "men" and "boys."

It seems to me that if you're going to face the scourge of teenage births, and you decide to leave the male of the species out of the discussion entirely, you're missing a fundamental part of the equation.

You need a culture of accountability for males, who are at least half the problem when it comes to the issue of women getting pregnant when they shouldn't. I think the bully pulpit provided to the governor would be a great place to make this point, but even the simple arithmetic of the phrase "it takes two to tango" seems to elude the Guv.

First thing worth mentioning: Not all children born of teen-aged mothers necessarily had teen-aged fathers. You might get that mental image of "Jack and Diane" when politicians talk about teen-aged mothers; but it's worth remembering that some young mothers are talked (or worse) into their circumstances by older boys and men. (The legal age of consent in our state, after all, is 16.)

So, if you want fewer teenage or out-of-wedlock pregnancies in Mississippi, then you'll need informed and empowered young women who know their rights, know the biology and are encouraged to speak up by their culture. You also need young men who are held just as accountable as "teen mothers" for unwanted pregnancies. It begins with education. You're going to need to have an intelligent plan for sex education in public schools, and abstinence-only doesn't cut it.

"Abstinence Plus" is a silly dance by legislators who apparently pretend to have no recollection of their own teenage years. But it's all we have to work with so far.

Barbour could start right now with an endorsement of Abstinence Plus; unfortunately, his response, as quoted in the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, was to joke about it:

"'I don't think that the problem with these kids is lack of sex education,' outgoing Gov. Haley Barbour said Thursday. 'I think they've got it down pat.'"

Hill-arious, Haley. Pass the Dewar's.

Second, Personhood was an egregious over-reach on women's rights, one that Barbour, in the end, publicly supported. If you're going to back a constitutional amendment that forces any girl or woman to have a child regardless of rape, incest or health of the mother then you are--by definition--going to have more one-parent (and no-parent) children to contend with. Fortunately, stronger thinkers than the governor proved to be on this issue defeated the initiative.

Third, Mississippi needs both a culture and a legal landscape that gives women the tools they need to get out of abusive relationships. Women in this state need to be able to leave and divorce men who abuse them, and deadbeat dads on any level need to be held accountable--both by the law and by their communities and leaders.

Not only did Barbour fail to prove a champion of such measures, but he's also the governor who rather notoriously and inexplicably pardoned a series of men who had maimed or killed their wives or girlfriends in domestic disputes--a revelation Ronni Mott and Sophie McNeil first exposed here in the Jackson Free Press. Enough, in fact, that it was starting to look like a pattern there for a little while. (Maybe that was some of the opposition research that embarrassed his team?)

So what, exactly, Barbour expects when he lays all this on the church's doorstep isn't clear. If he had at least said that churches should be turning out upstanding and respectful young men who learn to act with responsibility and dignity toward the women in their lives--that would, at least, be a start.

But, remember, I did a word search. The only appearance of the word "men" in the speech had "wo-" in front of it.

With Barbour headed out of office (and, probably, back to D.C.), maybe it isn't worth it to try to prod him in a direction that might offer more progress for women in his home state. There's a nice mix of laws, education and emphasis that the governor failed to address at all during his eight years in office.

But if Barbour wants to make amends on his way out the door, he could do a lot better than call on clergy to solve the problem--he could step up to the microphone himself and put the emphasis on empowering women, not scapegoating them.

Comment at http://www.jfp.ms.

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