At my church, we sometimes sing a song entitled, "Give thanks with a grateful heart." At first blush, that seemed redundant to me. How can you give thanks without a grateful heart? (more…)

Mississippi’s budget woes would not be nearly as severe if marriage still had the prominence it once did in the state, according to Forest Thigpen, president of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy (MCPP). His comments were based on a study released today in Washington, DC, that estimates the cost of divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing on federal, state, and local budgets. The landmark study, entitled “The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing,” is the first scholarly, peer-reviewed study to ever estimate the cost of “family fragmentation” to federal, state, and local governments. (more…)

Mississippi is known for having some of the strongest laws in the nation regulating abortions. But this year, the state House of Representatives passed a bill to repeal one of the most important of those laws - the law that requires a twenty-four hour waiting period and requires abortion clinics to provide information to women about the procedure itself, the stage of development of their unborn child, and other important information. (more…)

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"State Spending Outpaces Family Income"

Family income in Mississippi has doubled over the past 20 years, with median family income growing from about $23,000 to about $46,000 per year. (more…)

Marriage in Mississippi: One Man / One Woman?

We have sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

This decades-old observation from George Orwell can certainly be applied to the current debate over the definition of marriage.

To hear the arguments of those who seek to redefine marriage, you would think that marriage has, for all recorded history, been recognized as any collection of people who love each other, and that the current effort to amend the Constitution is a recent creation of the "religious right" who seek to impose their morality on everyone else. (more…)