The Nature of Things

It has been almost forty years since I last lived in Mississippi, but, in a sense, it will always be "home" because I grew up there. My parents are dead now, but I still have other family there, as well as friends that I grew up with, and so I retain an interest in what happens there. When I see a story in the news with the name of that state in the headline, I tend to pay attention and read it. So it was that when I recently came across this story in The Daily Beast , of course I had to read it. The thing is, when I see these stories about Mississippi, they are almost always bad news. This one was no exception. The first paragraph pointed out some of the appalling statistics about the state: It has the nation's highest poverty rate. It has the second-highest teen pregnancy rate and the highest teen birth rate. Its schools rank 48th out of the 50 states. It ranks second among states (to Louisiana) in the percentage of its citizens that it locks up. Its infancy mortality r...

Haley Barbour is the Republican governor of Mississippi. He and I have at least one thing in common: We grew up in that troubled state in the same generation. We both came of age in the 1960s. Strangely, Barbour remembers those days a bit differently than I do. He recently gave an interview to a conservative magazine and website in which he claimed that it was his generation - my generation - that led the switch in the South from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party and that it was all because of that integration thing. He said that the old Democrats fought "tooth and nail" against integration but by the time the '60s generation came along, they realized that it was indefensible, so the people who changed from Democrat to Republican were a whole different generation than those who fought integration. Barbour's generation, he said, led the switch because they had gone to integrated schools and an integrated college and they "never thought twice about ...

I see in the news from my home state that Mississippi is making itself notorious again. At least, the school board in Itawamba County is. It seems that they have canceled the senior prom because a lesbian student wanted to attend with her girlfriend and she wanted to wear a tuxedo. This was just too much for the sensibilities of these sensitive souls who were apparently afraid their their own kids might catch "the gay" from attending a social event with a lesbian couple. So they canceled the event and expressed the hope that some "private group" might sponsor a prom for the kids. What they didn't say but probably meant was that the "private group" should sponsor a prom for the straight kids. It's hard to believe that in the year 2010, the sexual orientation of a teenage girl is enough to cause grown-up people to behave this way. Why do they feel so threatened by this? What are so they afraid of? Do they really think that the homosexual cou...