by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
This year has witnessed flood of crackpot laws coming out of the very Republican Texas legislature. It is now easier to own a gun in the Lone Star state than ever before, and much, much harder to vote. It is also almost impossible to stay safe from the pandemic while inside of a Texas school, and anyone who wants an abortion had best have the time and resources to travel outside of the state to get that health care service.
More people with guns, fewer government controls over gun ownership, fewer of "those" people voting, more people getting sick and dying from COVID, and more poor women being forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to full term only to be met with rigid government neglect of children and families once the babies are born.
It must be hell living in Texas!
All of the new Texas laws are, to some extent, based in racism and classism, with the poor, and especially the racial minority poor, suffering the most from the draconian legislation. But the politicians of Texas like to describe their radical attacks on the poor and minorities as enhancements of freedom. They are out there designing laws that are intended to get the government out of people's lives and to return more of their God-given individual freedoms and liberties.
And by "people" they also mean fetuses with discernible heartbeats.
One of the new laws that went into effect in Texas this past week prohibits abortions in cases where a heartbeat can be detected, usually when the fetus is about six weeks along and often before the mother even realizes that she is pregnant. But instead of the state prescribing a punishment for this practice, the new law allows private citizens to bring lawsuits against individuals who break that law, and against doctors who perform the abortions, and even against drivers who take the women to doctors for the medical procedure. The suits may be for as much as $10,000.
The Texas legislature approved making individual citizens of Texas the equivalent of modern day bounty hunters. They can spy on their neighbors and then report them for the chance to go to court and collect an easy ten grand in a civil suit.
Neighbors reporting neighbors sounds like something right out of the Third Reich. It was, in fact, a hallmark of Stalinist Russia.
And you see that as "freedom," do you, Texas? There are many who believe that what you have created is the codification of "Big Brother" right in your very midst, an evil interloper peeking in windows and listening at the doors. Soon your clever legal strategy may spread to other areas, and states will be offering bounties for information on things like vaccination status and gun ownership. Why legislatures could put bounties on all sorts of personal information!
Is that what you call "freedom," Texas?
Because to me it sounds like the opposite of freedom. Today they snoop for you, but tomorrow they may snoop on you! Reap, sow, reap, sow!
1 comment:
I was surprised this afternoon to learn that the fetal heartbeat is not really a beating heart pumping blood through a circulation system. It is a cluster of cells that may someday become the pacemaker. It does not come from a fully developed heart and there is no circulation system. (heard on NPS's Science Friday)
The rhetoric doesn't surprise me, but the supreme court's treatment of the question of "standing" for a law suit does. Justice Neil Gorsuch has said that no one has standing to sue over a government established religion but he seems to accept that every Texan has standing to sue an Uber driver who drives a woman to an abortion clinic.
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