A neo-Confederate group in Mississippi is gathering signatures for a proposed constitutional amendment that would declare Christianity to be the official religion of the Magnolia State.
The Magnolia State Heritage Campaign wants to put “Initiative 46,” or “the Heritage Initiative,” before Mississippi voters in the 2015 elections. Mississippi secretary of state Delbert Hosemann allowed the group to start gathering signatures in late October; they need 120,000 signatures to get the question on the ballot. The Heritage Initiative is billed as an attempt to promote Southern culture. But the first provision tells you a lot about the group’s character. It would amend the state constitution to acknowledge Mississippi’s status as “a principally Christian and quintessentially Southern state,” and would declare the Bible to be “a foremost source of her founding principles, inspiration, and virtues.” Although this provision states that it should not be construed to contradict the federal or state constitutions’ guarantees of religious freedom, from where I’m sitting it’s not going to be nearly enough for this to be a lawsuit waiting to happen in the event it passes. Rob Boston of Americans United rightly points out that a state cannot pass a law that declares a state religion “even in a quasi-official manner” and expect it to pass federal Constitutional muster.
The backers of this proposal tried and failed to force the University of Mississippi to reinstate Colonel Reb as its mascot in 2011, so they decided to bundle that issue in with several others in order to attract as many voters as possible. It would declare April to be “Confederate Heritage Month,” and April 30 to be “Confederate Memorial Day.” It would also declare “Dixie” to be the official state song. Some of them seem to be ill-suited for ordinary statutes, let alone a constitution. For instance, this measure would write the nicknames for both Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Southern Mississippi’s teams–the Rebels, Bulldogs, and Golden Eagles, respectively–into the constitution, and encourage the playing of “Dixie” at Ole Miss games.
I have to wonder if the backers of this proposal are doing this to drive up turnout among social conservatives at the polls next year. After all, it’s more or less an article of faith on the fringe that laws passed via referendum are superior to ordinary laws, and are thus beyond judicial review. It’s hard not to conclude that the Magnolia State Heritage Campaign is essentially daring a judge to strike this down so they can throw red meat to the Republican base. Or maybe they’re following the advice of the Tupelo-based American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer, who believes that the First Amendment only protects Christians. As I mentioned in August, Fischer claims that the Founding Fathers intended for the rights of non-Christian religions to be a state matter, and that a state would be well within its rights to establish a state church.
This measure has attracted the support of at least one big name in Mississippi–Susan Akin, Miss America 1986. It’s not enough, however, to make up for the extremist hue of this campaign. Its Facebook page calls Abraham Lincoln “Dishonest Abe” and has numerous links to birther sites. The initiative’s proposal to keep the state’s historically black colleges independently operated is more than negated by its references to Barack Obama as a Muslim.
In reading this initiative, it looks like the writers made a huge blunder. It calls for all 12 provisions to be adopted into the state constitution en bloc. Unless I’m reading this wrong, there is no severability provision–meaning that if this passes and a judge rules the provision for a state religion is unconstitutional, the entire initiative gets tossed out. It sounds like a microcosm of this whole campaign. Any outfit that thinks it can get away with persuading a state to declare an official religion in 2014 is bound to be a comedy of errors.
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