In today's Dallas Morning News (Metro Section, Jacquielynn Floyd tells it like it is when it comes to the Texas political scene. All I can add is that abortion and guns seem to be the totality of the GOP's issues in America. Their legislative agenda is clear...anti-Obama, anti immigration reform, anti women and pro guns.
So I am reprinting her column (without permission but with full credit and disclosure) here for those of you who may have missed it or those of you who do not take this newspaper.
Sorry, sisters: Texas lawmakers think we’re idiots
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Jacquielynn Floyd
Published: 17 June 2013 10:22 PM
Updated: 17 June 2013 10:22 PM
If you are a woman in Texas, there’s bad news: Our state Legislature believes you are an imbecile.
It thinks you have the brain of a squirrel.
Not every single legislator is in this camp, of course. But there are plenty of them operating on the premise that the adult female of our species is a childlike ninny incapable of reason, analysis or independent thought.
Texas women — and Texas men who respect them — ought to be insulted. We ought to be aghast.
Anybody who feted the Legislature for its sensible, bipartisan tone during the just-concluded regular session is choking on crow today. The ensuing special session has, in a matter of days, devolved into a grandstanding parade float of restrictive gimmicks and tricks intended to make a legal, constitutionally sanctioned abortion virtually impossible to obtain.
And here’s their patronizing justification: If you want an abortion, it’s not because you’re not ready or able to be a parent. Lord knows, it doesn’t enter their collective noggins for a second that, if you want an abortion, your reasons are your private business and not theirs.
No, their belief is that if you want an abortion, it’s because you’re just too stupid to know better, too hopelessly ignorant to subscribe to their personal religious preferences.
It’s nothing new. Our legislative majority, led by our august (and interminable) governor, has spent the last couple of sessions busily chipping away at abortion rights.
As much as they’d like to, Texas legislators cannot amend the U.S. Constitution. So they’re going about it through a never-ending series of expensive, intrusive, medically unwarranted government rules and restrictions.
The state has already imposed a medically pointless but pointedly humiliating sonogram requirement for obtaining an abortion.
Now — perhaps anxious to keep up with other states also attempting to enact full-blown theocracies — legislators want to push a lot further.
The omnibus bill being bulldozed through the Texas special session would place an outright ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. It would force unnecessary, expensive upgrades to clinics that offer this service — so much so that most of them would have to shut down.
It would tell doctors how to administer drugs, perform procedures, affiliate with hospitals and talk to their patients. If anyone is justified in being even more insulted than Texas women at all this interference, it’s Texas doctors.
But this is a great way for ambitious politicians to curry favor with social extremists, whose votes they value an awful lot more than they value your rights or your dignity.
And (brace yourself for a breathtaking insult — you might want to hold onto a chair or something) they think you are such a clueless ignoramus that you don’t notice the spectacular hypocrisy here.
They think you don’t grasp the inherent contradiction that this is coming from the same politicians who drone on ad nauseam about getting the nanny-state gubbermint off our backs!
Listen, I don’t love talking about this. Nothing makes people angrier; nothing generates more flaming insults; nothing encourages more people to call the big bosses and try to get me fired.
But it’s impossible to not speak up when somebody is trying to force their personal brand of religion on everybody else. That’s not how Texas and not how America are supposed to work.
Yet that’s what’s going on here, behind a dense cloud of made-up science and phony medicine. These legislative zealots think you’re too busy shopping for shoes and watching Real Housewives to find out what reputable medical and scientific organizations have to report.
Yes, I know — it’s maddeningly patronizing and offensive to be told that all this is being done “for your own good.” The leaders of this merry band — most of them lawyers and nearly all of them men — think they know more about medicine than your doctor, more about theology than your pastor, more about your private business than your best friend and more about your own life than you.
Just as bad, if not worse, is that the same people who say they want to protect unborn children don’t seem to mind much that our state does a comparatively lousy job protecting the born ones from sickness, poverty, ignorance and abusive adults.
They think you’re too wrapped up in People magazine and getting your nails done to notice this bizarre inconsistency.
Whether an abortion is the right option, or even an option at all, is an intensely personal decision. I have nothing but respect for people whose personal moral beliefs take that option off the table.
But it’s hard to have anything but contempt for those who think they can make that decision for tens of thousands of Texas women.
Because they’re just showing the contempt they have for us.
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