"So sad. ... Former Mississippi governor Musgrove endorses gay marriage, same-sex adoptions."
—Pro-Life lobbyist Terri Herring via Twitter March 22, regarding former Mississippi Gov. Ronnie Musgrove's change of heart about LGBT marriage equality and adoption.
Why it stinks: Terri Herring, whom Gov. Phil Bryant nominated for a spot on the state's powerful Board of Health, has spent more than a quarter century fighting to end a woman's legal right to abortion. Now, she's also speaking out against the rights of gay and lesbian couples.
The rights of married people do not begin and end with procreation, as many fundamentalists have argued. If that were true, couples unable to, or those that choose not to have biological children could not enjoy those rights. Marriage is a legal contract that provides a range of benefits.
"I came to understand that ... we cannot continue to blindly disqualify people from becoming parents--just as we should not deny an entire group of people the basic civil right of marriage--simply because many of us fear what we do not understand," Musgrove wrote in a Huffington Post column. "Like a majority of Americans in recent years, I came to understand that fear of homosexuality was leading our governments ... to deny the equal rights to an entire segment of our population that are afforded all of us under the Constitution."
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