Connect with us

Mississippi Today

In the Mississippi Bible Belt, a family wrestles with raising trans kids in the Mormon church

Published

on

This article was copublished with The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom covering gender, politics, and policy. Sign up for The 19th’s newsletter here.

Marie and Brian Bauman held hands as they walked into the quiet worship hall of a north Mississippi church and situated themselves in the front row. Five of their seven kids settled on either side of them.

Most of the few dozen, mostly white, congregants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints were dressed for a typical Sunday. The women wore dresses and skirts; the men, collared shirts and ties. But one member of the Baumans stood out: Jack, who wore pants, a tuxedo shirt dotted with silver lightning bolts and a lilac tie. Black nail polish was chipping off of his fingernails.

Ever since he could talk, Jack stated he was a boy. He invented new names for himself — first to use at home, then at school and church. Now 11 years old, Jack is one of a few thousand transgender or gender-nonconforming children in Mississippi growing up in a time when state lawmakers are increasingly hostile toward them.

That Sunday in February marked 40 days since House Republicans passed House Bill 1125 to ban transgender youth in Mississippi from receiving gender-affirming care, which lawmakers repeatedly likened to child abuse and a violation of God’s will, despite every major medical association supporting the treatment. Gov. Tate Reeves would soon make it law, a decision supported by many, but not all, in the Baumans’ largely conservative congregation.

The impending ban made the Baumans fearful for Jack’s health, safety and well-being. It also stirred up painful memories of the time in 2020 when their eldest daughter, Aria, came out as trans as a young adult, only to be told by church leaders that she’d be removed if she wore a dress to church again.

Ever since then, this family, whose names have been changed to protect them from retaliation, has grappled with a contradiction underscored by the surge of anti-trans bills in America: whether it’s possible to raise trans kids in a faith with a strict binary view of gender. Marie and Brian are choosing this path, but many religious families are not.

The family bowed their heads as an elderly member of the church, referred to as a brother, began speaking at the lectern. He is perceived by the family as one of the more accepting members of the congregation, sometimes sending the kids Cow Tales and other candy, but his speech quickly turned into a righteous counsel.

“We see evil crying and carnality covering the earth,” the brother said. “Liars, thieves, adulterers, homosexuals, murderers scarcely seek to hide their abominations from our view. Iniquity abounds, there is no peace on earth. We see evil forces everywhere uniting to destroy the family, to ridicule morality and decency.”

Jack yawned. Curled over a hymn book, he traced a tiny portrait of Jesus in black ink on a program.

“I want you to know that I love each and every one of you,” the brother said, wrapping up. “I’ve had my trials, we’ve all had trials, but together we can face them, we can deal with them and we can work through them.”

Marie hoped that could be the case for her family. She didn’t know at the time that Aria had all but left the church. Her second-oldest child, who like Aria and Jack is also gender-nonconforming, was inching away, too.

At that moment in the sanctuary, Marie hoped that by staying in the church, she might convince other Mormons to become more accepting.

“We’re taught that we’re in families to learn to be more Christ-like,” she said. “One of our core beliefs is that in the afterlife, we can’t take anything with us but we take our relationships. If my relationship with my kids is bad, how can I take anything with me?”

Marie holds onto the belief that Mormonism, which prohibits women from serving in ecclesiastical roles, could become accepting of her children, but sometimes she’s uncertain. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today

After worship, it was time for Sunday school. In the Baumans’ church, like other Mormon churches, most classes are sorted by gender.

The men gathered alone in the large hall. Kids rushed out into the hallway, heading to their lessons, and the women followed. But Marie did not go with them. She found it difficult to participate in theological discussions with other congregants after what happened with Aria. She was happiest teaching the kids music, but it wasn’t time for that yet, so she waited on a couch in the hallway. A framed portrait of Jesus Christ hung nearby.

As a Mormon trying to raise gender-nonconforming kids, Marie says she sees contradictions in the church’s teachings.

“There were so many places where the choices that were made were terrible — hey,” she said, interrupting herself as the branch president, one of the leaders who had told Aria she should not wear a dress to church again, stopped to say hello. She continued as he walked away: “I find it difficult that you can say we should love everyone and then get up and say just because you’re trans that makes you inherently evil.”

Still, she holds onto the belief that Mormonism, which prohibits women from serving in ecclesiastical roles, could become accepting of her children. But even she recognizes that she might be doing some mental gymnastics.

“We talk about personal revelation, and I could be wanting to believe things so badly that I really believe that,” she said.

“Personal revelation” is a kind of epiphany in Mormon doctrine. It’s divine intervention, a direct message from God. Like many Mormons, it has played a significant role in the life of Marie and her family. It motivated the family to move from Utah to Mississippi in 2017, joining roughly 22,000 other Mormons in the state, according to the church. A new congregation was starting in the state’s northern Hill County, and the Baumans’ wanted to be in a place they felt needed them.

Living in the Bible Belt was an adjustment for everyone, but especially for Aria. Though Mississippi and Utah have a nearly identical breakdown of registered Democrats to Republicans, the Baumans’ new town was tiny, with more Baptist churches than restaurants. It felt more conservative than the Utah college town Aria had left behind.

Growing up, Aria remembers feeling uneasy any time she heard about LGBTQ+ issues in the church, like when LDS leadership campaigned against marriage equality or instituted policies calling on Mormon children to renounce their gay parents. It wasn’t until Aria made queer friends in school, right before the family left Utah, that she understood why these issues bothered her — and started to consider coming out as trans.

Marie and Brian moved their family from Utah to Mississippi in 2017 to be in a place where God needed them as a new congregation was forming. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today

But during that 2017 summer in rural Mississippi, more than 1,500 miles away from those friends, there was a discussion between congregants at her new church that triggered Aria. She recalled it was “about how awful everything was because the world was getting more progressive and queer people were becoming more acceptable.”

After the discussion, she ran out into the parking lot hyperventilating. She knew it would probably be safe to tell Marie, who had followed her, why she was so upset — Jack had already come out by then. But she couldn’t bring herself to.

“It was scary,” Aria said. “It affirmed coming out was not safe.”

The family’s move coincided with Donald Trump’s presidency and a nationwide rise in anti-trans bills and policies targeting bathrooms, sports teams, libraries and the classroom. Marie followed these bills closely and joined support groups for trans Mormons and their loved ones. She was looking for ways to advocate for Jack, motivated by family lore of relatives who were suffragettes.

“We are always dragging the church behind the culture,” she said.

By the time the legislative session started this past January, Marie was invested. She joined a Zoom call with other parents of trans kids in Mississippi and learned that lawmakers had already introduced at least 31 bills targeting the LGBTQ+ community. Many of these were inspired by model legislation from right-wing Christian groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, which has argued that “when culture refuses to acknowledge the fundamental truth that we are created male and female in the image of God, everyone loses.”

Marie observed that outside of a handful of parents and activists, few in Mississippi were advocating for the trans community. At a protest in mid-February, a couple of progressive faith leaders spoke out against the bill.

But they weren’t represented by any lawmaker who has the power to pass legislation inside the Capitol. Republicans, who maintain a supermajority, fell in line to back HB 1125 when it was introduced. Gov. Reeves had signaled it was a priority during his yearly State of the State address. The Democrats’ then-presumptive nominee for governor, Brandon Presley, remained silent about the bill. And when Democratic lawmakers did ask questions about the bill, they repeatedly failed to call out the inaccurate information about gender-affirming care that Republicans gave in response.

“We’re talking about the total and complete removal of parts that God gave you and trying to reverse that,” one of the bill’s handlers, Sen. Joey Fillingane, said during a Senate committee hearing.

In the classroom that Sunday in February, as another mom helped Marie set up folding chairs in preparation for the music lesson, they talked about HB 1125 and how it could affect Jack.

Marie has been thinking about trans issues since Jack was a little kid. She decided years ago that she would be open about her family with anyone who asked, a philosophy that stemmed from a quote she’d read from a motivational speaker: “It’s hard to hate up close.” But she also understands that for many people, especially other members of her congregation, this is new. The common talking points from politicians about parents “coaching” their parents to be trans — comments that infuriate her — can stick with people.

HB 1125 wasn’t a problem for Jack yet, Marie explained to the other mom. Jack’s “social transition” was flexible, meaning that sometimes he went by he/him pronouns and wore masculine clothes, and sometimes he didn’t, a decision Marie let him lead. But if puberty started to harm Jack’s mental health, then the law would become a barrier to the care that Marie would seek.

“Jack currently is not on any hormone blockers, but it’s something we’ve talked about if her mental health is affected,” Marie said.

“I can understand how somebody who has no experience with it might say, ‘No, you shouldn’t let kids have these kinds of hormones,’” the mom replied. “I get that because, I mean, I’m a mom.”

“Right,” Marie said.

“But I’ve watched Jack grow up, so it’s not like I can sit here and say she’s coached into that. Like, I see this. So to deny care, like it’s detrimental for her,” the mom trailed off. “It’s complicated.”

Jack sometimes goes by the name Marie and Brian gave him, and sometimes by the one he chose. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today

Support like that from congregants was new to Marie. Officially, the LDS church’s stance on trans people is outlined in a document called “the General Handbook.” It advises against transitioning and states that trans Mormons who do would likely face “membership restrictions” that range from no longer being allowed to teach a class to being removed from the congregation entirely.

These guidelines can push queer people away from the church. There are many examples of LGBTQ+ Mormons who have been ostracized by their churches or disavowed by family members who’ve decided the religion is not compatible with acceptance. It’s a particular issue for the rising generation of Mormons: For the increasing number of millennials who’ve left, the church’s stance on LGBTQ+ issues was the third biggest reason.

Yet these rules aren’t fixed, and LDS leadership has changed its stance on social issues in the past, often through personal revelation. Notably, that’s how church leaders decided Black people could hold certain leadership positions in the 1970s. It wasn’t until the 1980s, amid a cultural recoil to the feminist movement and a rise in LGBTQ+ activism, that the church leadership started to insist gender was an immutable characteristic, said Taylor Petrey, a professor at Kalamazoo College who has studied the development of Mormon thought on gender and sexuality.

An important backdrop to the leadership’s positions on social issues, Petrey said, is a desire to dilute the religion’s stereotype, gained from the practice of polygamy, as sexually deviant.

The church often takes “a strong position in favor of a very rigid sexual morality because of that memory of what it meant to be on the outside of American sexual norms,” he said. “They cling very closely to heterosexuality, to patriarchy, to a kind of white, heteronormative family as the new image of sexuality that the church wants to promote.”

Strategy has also played a role in the changing norms. In 2008, the church famously backed California’s Proposition 8, a referendum that banned same-sex marriage. Leadership at the highest levels urged members to vote for it; according to some estimates, members spent more than $20 million in support.

The backlash was fierce. There were protests outside Mormon temples across the country; a popular gay rights blogger called for tourists to boycott skiing in Utah. The church backtracked and, a few years later, supported an anti-discrimination law in Utah, with some religious carve-outs, that protected LGBTQ+ people. Then last year, the church went further, backing a bill in Congress to protect same-sex marriage.

Petrey added that the General Handbook is not compulsory; congregations can deviate from it based on their members’ needs and expectations.

“Family unity, family, love, family harmony are such prioritized values that when the church or society is seen as causing a rift or is potentially a source of pain, many Latter Day Saints are like, ‘Well, I’ve been taught all my life that the family is the most important thing,’” Petrey said. “‘I’m going to choose my family.’”

That thinking is one reason why Aria stayed in the church despite feeling increasingly wary. Aria also knew that if she came out, she would risk severing her ties to her family, possibly forever. In Mormon doctrine, families stay together in the afterlife, as long as they’ve remained in the church in good standing.

By the time she was gearing up in 2020 for her mission, a rite-of-passage for Mormons that involves volunteer service or proselytizing, Aria knew she was trans. But she hadn’t come out yet, even as she was growing away from the church. A conversation with a family member who left the church inspired her to explore other forms of spirituality like paganism; its dramatic nature was attractive to her as a former theater kid. In Mississippi, she got close to a non-denominational pastor. She told him she was trans and, right after, he assaulted her.

“I kind of just went back deep in the closet,” she said.

Her mission loomed. It came with some added pressure: Aria and her parents thought she would be the first Mormon from north Mississippi to go on a mission since the late 1980s and possibly the first ever from the area to complete one. Her understanding was that a woman who went before her died before she could finish.

She had to prepare for it. Missionaries are expected to keep their hair cropped, but Aria’s hair was long and curly, so she burned locks of it in the woods. She tied herself blindfolded to a stake outside the family’s home, a ritual she said was meant to create a division in her life between her mission and “everything else.”

But the night before she was set to get on the plane to the Pacific Northwest, she broke down and told Marie that she was trans. Marie encouraged her to try to do the mission anyway.

“There is nothing you’ve said that makes you unworthy to serve,” Marie said she told Aria.

So Aria went. Away from home, her antidepressants stopped working. Her panic attacks became more frequent. Soon, it all became too much to wear the elder’s uniform of pants, a white button-up and a tie. She could no longer pretend like everything was OK. She made plans for suicide. But before that, Aria talked to a church therapist who helped her get a plane ticket home.

In the weeks that followed, Aria came out to her dad via letters, because that was easier than speaking the words. That October, she told her sister Sabrina, who is now 8 years old, when they were quarantined together after a COVID exposure in the bedroom they shared. She was touched when Sabrina suggested they both wear dresses to church that Sunday.

Sabrina wasn’t called to church that day — during the pandemic, congregants who were not needed stayed home — but Aria was asked to teach a primary class. So she donned a sage green wrap dress patterned with white flowers. She didn’t think it would be an issue because a few nights earlier, she’d worn a feminine vampire costume to a church Halloween party.

At service, only one person said something to her: A kid in her primary class asked why she was wearing a dress. She asked him why he wasn’t.

But a few days later, the branch president invited Aria to his house. Another leader was there. They told her she had been disruptive and warned that if she wore a dress again, she would be “exported out,” meaning removed from the church. She would be welcome back if she wore a pantsuit, the branch president said.

Aria left in tears.

The next week, church was awkward for Marie and Brian. Even though no one said anything to them about Aria, it felt like everyone knew what had happened.

“There was this weird thing, like almost a pity,” Marie said of the aftermath at church. “Like, ‘I’m sorry your child is doing this.’ And I just kept thinking, ‘I don’t feel bad about this. I feel bad that you feel bad about this.’”

Mississippi’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors has made the Baumans fearful of Jack’s future health, safety and well-being. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today

On the way home in their golden minivan, the family went over what they had learned that day at church that day in February. The three teenagers had just watched a YouTube video, well-known to many Mormons, about a bespectacled housewife who judges her neighbor’s dirty clothesline. One day, she is astonished — her neighbor’s laundry is clean. Then her husband informs her that actually, she had been looking at the woman’s home through her own dirty kitchen windows. He had washed them.

The video ends with a lesson from the LDS president who notes, “thus the commandment, ‘judge not.’”

At home, Jack and Sabrina pulled on rain boots and ran around the family’s hilly property, the family’s older rescue dog bounding after them. They showed off the chicken coops, their goats with Russian names and a tree that Jack called “Whomping Willow,” but the priority was looking at the hogs. The babies had been castrated the day before, their tails still limp from the alcohol. The parents were plopped in the mud.

“You can tell which one is a girl, because the girl has,” Jack paused. “You’re going to have to explain this, Sabrina. I don’t want to say it out loud.”

“What?” Sabrina asked. “Both of them have nipples.”

“But hers are bigger,” Jack said.

Out of all seven children, Jack and Sabrina had spent the bulk of their childhood in Mississippi. At school, Jack was sometimes called by the name Marie and Brian gave him, sometimes by the one he chose; it depended on the teacher. The routine he has adopted — switching between pronouns — was growing uncomfortable, he said.

“I don’t know, I mean, I was born a girl but I want to be a boy,” Jack said.

“Jack is a girl at school and a boy at home,” Sabrina said.

“It’s weird,” Jack said. He announced the tour was over.

11 years old, Jack is one of a few thousand transgender or gender-nonconforming children in Mississippi growing up in a time when state lawmakers are increasingly hostile to their existence. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today

As Brian prepped chicken soup for dinner, Marie sat on the family’s velvet green couch and scrolled through her phone, searching for her favorite family photo. It shows the family standing hand-in-hand, eyes squinting in the bright sun, surrounded by dense, green vines. Aria is wearing the same dress she wore to church and fingerless, black-and-gray striped gloves.

Ever since the incident with church leaders, Marie said, Aria had been drifting away from the church. She tried attending service at a congregation in Tennessee, but the hour-long drive was tiring. The branch president came to the family’s house to try to apologize, but Aria had a panic attack. As he talked to Marie, Aria sat on the porch until she was finally calm enough to meet with him.

By fall 2021, she decided to move back to Utah to be closer to her queer friends and to try college again at a state university. In civics class one day, Aria listened to a conversation about how much money church leadership had poured into opposing same-sex marriage in California. It struck her that this wasn’t just the actions of people like her mom or other church congregants; who are, in Aria’s view, “apologetics” who don’t know better. The church’s support of Proposition 8 was an organized campaign to oppose her rights and the rights of people like her, Aria said. Still, it hurt to realize that her parents supported that campaign through tithings.

She had a revelation: “It finally hit me that it couldn’t be true, that it couldn’t be for me, that I was never going to fit within Christianity.”

“I came to the conclusion that either the church was wrong in every way, and I shouldn’t be associated with it, or the church was right and if that’s the case, then God hates me anyway so I might as well leave,” she said.

All this led Aria to tell Marie in mid-February that she was considering having her name purged from church records, a step that would completely sever her relationship with Mormonism. In March, she made it official.

Marie said she knew she could not dissuade Aria. She cites the varying viewpoints of congregants like the brother, or even the branch president. And she understands why Aria thinks it’s hypocritical of her to pay tithings to the church even as she disagrees with its stance on LGBTQ+ issues.

But, she said, she’s not responsible for how the church spends its money.

“I’m not going to be held responsible for that in the afterlife, whoever is mishandling it now — it is on them,” she said.

If Aria can’t be part of the church, Marie said she understands. Mormons are more conservative, and she said that often, the church’s culture is misunderstood as a substitute for doctrine.

“I may have issues with church policy but that doesn’t change my faith in the doctrine,” Marie said. “I don’t want to be doing mental gymnastics, and I hope that’s not what I’m doing. I do make a distinction between the church as an institution and the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

As for Jack, Marie said she and her husband haven’t told him about the bill yet, to avoid causing undue anxiety or make him feel like a path forward is foreclosed as long as they live in Mississippi.

As Marie talked, Jack and his siblings passed around a piece of paper, playing a game in which each person contributes a sentence to a short story. Jack handed the final result — a story about an animal that is ostracized by its family but ultimately finds a way to survive. Was it about them?

Jack grinned. “Maybe.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate

Published

on

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:34:00

Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.  

House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.

The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.

Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.

“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”

Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.

“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”

The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.

The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.

The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.

People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.   

The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.

“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.” 

If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.

Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.

Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.

The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature. 

During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube. 

As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.

“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Continue Reading

Mississippi Today

House gives Senate 5 p.m. deadline to come to table, or legislative session ends with no state budget

Published

on

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:13:00

The House on Wednesday attempted one final time to revive negotiations between it and the Senate over passing a state budget.

Otherwise, the two Republican-led chambers will likely end their session without funding government services for the next fiscal year and potentially jeopardize state agencies.

The House on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure to extend the legislative session and revive budget bills that had died on legislative deadlines last weekend. 

House Speaker Jason White said he did not have any prior commitment that the Senate would agree to the proposal, but he wanted to extend one last offer to pass the budget. White, a Republican from West, said if he did not hear from the Senate by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, his chamber would end its regular session. 

“The ball is in their court,” White said of the Senate. “Every indication has been that they would not agree to extend the deadlines for purposes of doing the budget. I don’t know why that is. We did it last year, and we’ve done it most years.” 

But it did not appear likely Wednesday afternoon that the Senate would comply.

The Mississippi Legislature has not left Jackson without setting at least most of the state budget since 2009, when then Gov. Haley Barbour had to force them back to set one to avoid a government shutdown.

The House measure to extend the session is now before the Senate for consideration. To pass, it would require a two-thirds majority vote of senators. But that might prove impossible. Numerous senators on both sides of the aisle vowed to vote against extending the current session, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the chamber said such an extension likely couldn’t pass. 

Senate leadership seemed surprised at the news that the House passed the resolution to negotiate a budget, and several senators earlier on Wednesday made passing references to ending the session without passing a budget. 

“We’ll look at it after it passes the full House,” Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby said. 

The House and Senate, each having a Republican supermajority, have fought over many issues since the legislative session began early January.

But the battle over a tax overhaul plan, including elimination of the state individual income tax, appeared to cause a major rift. Lawmakers did pass a tax overhaul, which the governor has signed into law, but Senate leaders cried foul over how it passed, with the House seizing on typos in the Senate’s proposal that accidentally resembled the House’s more aggressive elimination plan.

The Senate had urged caution in eliminating the income tax, and had economic growth triggers that would have likely phased in the elimination over many years. But the typos essentially negated the triggers, and the House and governor ran with it.

The two chambers have also recently fought over the budget. White said he communicated directly with Senate leaders that the House would stand firm on not passing a budget late in the session. 

But Senate leaders said they had trouble getting the House to meet with them to haggle out the final budget. 

On the normally scheduled “conference weekend” with a deadline to agree to a budget last Saturday, the House did not show, taking the weekend off. This angered Hosemann and the Senate. All the budget bills died, requiring a vote to extend the session, or the governor forcing them into a special session.

If the Legislature ends its regular session without adopting a budget, the only option to fund state agencies before their budgets expire on June 30 is for Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers back into a special session later. 

“There really isn’t any other option (than the governor calling a special session),” Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann previously said. 

If Reeves calls a special session, he gets to set the Legislature’s agenda. A special session call gives an otherwise constitutionally weak Mississippi governor more power over the Legislature. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Continue Reading

Mississippi Today

Amount of federal cuts to health agencies doubles

Published

on

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 14:48:00

Cuts to public health and mental health funding in Mississippi have doubled – reaching approximately $238 million – since initial estimates last week, when cancellations to federal grants allocated for COVID-19 pandemic relief were first announced.

Slashed funding to the state’s health department will impact community health workers, planned improvements to the public health laboratory, the agency’s ability to provide COVID-19 vaccinations and preparedness efforts for emerging pathogens, like H5 bird flu. 

The grant cancellations, which total $230 million, will not be catastrophic for the agency, State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney told members of the Mississippi House Democratic Caucus at the Capitol April 1. 

But they will set back the agency, which is still working to recover after the COVID-19 pandemic decimated its workforce and exposed “serious deficiencies” in the agency’s data collection and management systems.

The cuts will have a more significant impact on the state’s economy and agency subgrantees, who carry out public health work on the ground with health department grants, he said. 

“The agency is okay. But I’m very worried about all of our partners all over the state,” Edney told lawmakers. 

The health department was forced to lay off 17 contract workers as a result of the grant cancellations, though Edney said he aims to rehire them under new contracts. 

Other positions funded by health department grants are in jeopardy. Two community health workers at Back Bay Mission, a nonprofit that supports people living in poverty in Biloxi, were laid off as a result of the cuts, according to WLOX. It’s unclear how many more community health workers, who educate and help people access health care, have been impacted statewide.

The department was in the process of purchasing a comprehensive data management system before the cuts and has lost the ability to invest in the Mississippi Public Health Laboratory, he said. The laboratory performs environmental and clinical testing services that aid in the prevention and control of disease. 

Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney addresses lawmakers during the Democratic caucus meeting at the State Capitol in Jackson, Miss., on Tuesday, April 1, 2025. The discussion centered on potential federal healthcare funding cuts.

The agency has worked to reduce its dependence on federal funds, Edney said, which will help it weather the storm. Sixty-six percent of the department’s budget is federally funded. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pulled back $11.4 billion in funding to state health departments nationwide last week. The funding was originally allocated by Congress for testing and vaccination against the coronavirus as part of COVID-19 relief legislation, and to address health disparities in high-risk and underserved populations. An additional $1 billion from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration was also terminated. 

“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” the Department of Health and Human Services Director of Communications Andrew Nixon said in a statement.

HHS did not respond to questions from Mississippi Today about the cuts in Mississippi.

Democratic attorneys general and governors in 23 states filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Tuesday, arguing that the sudden cancellation of the funding was unlawful and seeking injunctive relief to halt the cuts. Mississippi did not join the suit. 

Mental health cuts

The Department of Mental Health received about $7.5 million in cuts to federal grants from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. 

Phaedre Cole, president of the Mississippi Association of Community Mental Health Centers, speaks to lawmakers about federal healthcare funding cuts during the Democratic caucus meeting at the State Capitol in Jackson, Miss., on Tuesday, April 1, 2025.

Over half of the cuts were to community mental health centers, and supported alcohol and drug treatment services for people who can not afford treatment, housing services for parenting and pregnant women and their children, and prevention services. 

The cuts could result in reduced beds at community mental health centers, Phaedre Cole, the director of Life Help and President of Mississippi Association of Community Mental Health Centers, told lawmakers April 1. 

Community mental health centers in Mississippi are already struggling to keep their doors open. Four centers in the state have closed since 2012, and a third have an imminent to high risk of closure, Cole told legislators at a hearing last December. 

“We are facing a financial crisis that threatens our ability to maintain our mission,” she said Dec. 5. 

Cuts to the department will also impact diversion coordinators, who are charged with reducing recidivism of people with serious mental illness to the state’s mental health hospital, a program for first-episode psychosis, youth mental health court funding, school-aged mental health programs and suicide response programs. 

The Department of Mental Health hopes to reallocate existing funding from alcohol tax revenue and federal block grant funding to discontinued programs.

The agency posted a list of all the services that have received funding cuts. The State Department of Health plans to post such a list, said spokesperson Greg Flynn.

Health leaders have expressed fear that there could be more funding cuts coming. 

“My concern is that this is the beginning and not the end,” said Edney.  

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Continue Reading

Trending