Editorial Holds Out Hope for Unenlightened Conservative Mississippians
The Times celebrated liberal victories at the ballot box from Tuesday, while ripping into conservatives as extreme and unenlightened, in Thursday's lead editorial 'Back to Common Sense at the Polls – In state after state, voters rejected the extreme agenda of Republican lawmakers.'
Note the condescending, damned-with-faint-praise tone reserved for those hicks in Mississippi.
In Arizona, voters recoiling from anti-immigrant stridency recalled the State Senate's president, Russell Pearce, who was the main sponsor and public face of Arizona's immigration law, which imposed sweeping police-state powers to harass and expel people without papers. The law, largely blocked in federal court, has done huge damage to the state's economy and reputation, and voters in Mr. Pearce's district clearly had had enough.
Maine voters saw right through the partisanship behind Republican attempts to eliminate same-day voter registration and reinstated it. In state after state, Republicans have tried to make it harder to vote, knowing that restrictions tend to hit lower-income and minority voters - traditional supporters of Democrats. Unfortunately, Mississippi voters were not as enlightened, approving a new requirement for identification cards at the polls.
But, even the voters in that state, one of the country's most conservative, decisively rejected an amendment to ban abortion by declaring a fertilized egg as a person. The measure also would have effectively banned some forms of contraception and even in-vitro fertilization, and 58 percent of voters said that was going too far.
