(Washington Stand) Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves (R) didn’t just sign a bill on Tuesday protecting children from harmful drugs and surgeries that accompany a gender transition. He also offered a lengthy, well-reasoned defense of the legislation and then competently defended his conservative position against the media’s attacks.
In doing so, Reeves broke the mold of previous red-state governors who have been given a chance to sign robust protections against gender transition procedures for minors. Arkansas’s Asa Hutchinson vetoed the nation’s very first SAFE Act in 2021. South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, closely allied to a hospital system that performs gender transition procedures on minors, did sign a “Help Not Harm” bill last month, but only after facing down conservative outrage over her 2022 veto of a women’s sports bill and a massive public pressure campaign that culminated in the bill garnering a veto-proof majority in the legislature.
By contrast, Reeves was neither hostile nor reluctant, but he forthrightly championed the conservative, commonsense principles embodied by a bill to protect children from bearing the lifelong pain and scars of an immature infatuation with the transgender ideology. (Read More)