Why I'm not moving to Mississippi YET

A rural Mississippi newspaper recently posted a front page story on the wedding of a lesbian couple, one of whom has been battling brain cancer.  Rather than folks sending hopes and prayers for the ailing woman and congrats for the happy couple, the newspaper received a flurry of hate calls, letters, Facebook posts, etc. because they printed a story about LESBIANS.

Lock your doors.  Hide the children's eyes.  Burn all signs of this heinous event.  There are lesbians getting married in Mississippi.  Get thee to an exorcist post haste.

Thanks to a USM student named Ashton Pittman, the story went viral.  And thankfully, the newspaper did take the high road and printed some of the negative letters along with the newspaper owner's own take on the "controversial" story (see below).  The tide then turned and owner Jim Cegielski says he now receives 99 percent supportive phone calls and letters.

The takeaway is the good guys won.  Sure bigots will always be bigots and they are entitled to freedom of speech to spout off whatever hatred they want.  What's important is that more and more, people are being called out for being racist, homophobic, and misogynistic when they say hateful things regarding race, sexual preference or gender.  And for this newspaper and this lesbian couple, the outpouring of support is a major step forward for Mississippi. 

And when the LGBT community can start making progress in Mississippi, we can say we are definitely making progress.

Owner's response to the backlash:

We were well aware that the majority of people in Jones County are not in favor of gay marriage. However, any decent newspaper with a backbone can not base decisions on whether to cover a story based on whether the story will make people angry.

The job of a community newspaper is not pretending something didn't take place or ignoring it because it will upset people. No, our job is to inform readers what is going on in our town and let them make their own judgments. That is exactly what we did with the wedding story. Our reporter heard about the wedding, attended it, interviewed some of the participants and wrote a news story. If there had been protestors at the wedding, we would have covered that the exact same way … but there weren't any. We never said it was a good thing or a bad thing, we simply did our job by telling people what took place.

I took the bulk of the irate phone calls from people who called the paper to complain. Most of the complaints seem to revolve around the headline, "Historic Wedding," and the fact that we chose to put the story on the front page. My answer to the "Historic Wedding" headline is pretty simple. You don't have like something for it to be historic.

The holocaust, bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Black Sox scandal are all historic. I'm in no way comparing the downtown wedding of two females to any of those events (even though some of you made it quite clear that you think gay marriage is much worse).

We have stories about child molesters, murders and all kinds of vicious, barbaric acts of evil committed by heinous criminals on our front page and yet we never receive a call from anyone saying 'I don't need my children reading this.' Never. Ever. However, a story about two women exchanging marriage vows and we get swamped with people worried about their children.