Judge Rules Planned Parenthood May Now Tap Dance On Mississippi's Face

Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant had a dream. A dream to no longer be the state with the  fourth highest teen pregnancy rate in the country, but the first. A dream to hold on to first place in rates of both chlamydia and gonorrhea. A dream to shut Planned Parenthood, an organization that actively prevents these things, down for good.

His plan was to enact a law that would prevent any medical providers that perform abortions from receiving funds from the state's Medicaid program, preventing Planned Parenthood from serving the low-income patients most in need of care. You know, because if you are the poorest state in the country and already paying out $155 MILLION a year in taxpayer money to cover the costs of your insane teen pregnancy problem, you can definitely afford to get rid of Planned Parenthood.

BUT ALAS, IT WAS A DREAM DEFERRED.

 A federal judge has ruled against the law, siding with Planned Parenthood. As has happened already with literally every other state that has tried to pull this shit. In fact, it's so well established that this is not a thing states are allowed to do, that in his ruling, U.S. District Judge Daniel Jordan III noted that "essentially every court to consider similar laws has found that they violate" federal laws.

Bryant responded to the ruling by stating:

"I believe the law was the right thing to do and I will continue to stand with the legislature and people of Mississippi who do not want their hard-earned money going to the largest abortion provider in the nation."

Except, unfortunately, the law was not right, not legally, anyway -- because it interferes with the rights of other people in Mississippi to choose their health care provider. Them's the breaks!

Sometimes you have to pay for things, out of your taxes, that you do not necessarily approve of. For instance, I'm sure there are people in Mississippi who don't want their tax money going to the state's completely absurd and clearly ineffective abstinence-only sexual education curriculum that involves licking chocolate and telling kids that if they have sex they are like chocolate someone licked. Or for, again, the $155,000,000 they have to pay to cover the teen pregnancies that result from that curriculum. I'm sure they'd rather have funds going to Planned Parenthood in hopes of curbing some of that!

Louisiana didn't get to have its dumb law preventing funds from going to Planned Parenthood, and neither did Ohio. You would think that at some point they wouldn't keep trying to do the same thing and expecting different results, but alas, they never do.

[ Reuters ]