Thursday, June 27, 2013

Interserere Faciem ad Palmis

Methinks Texas is not thinking this one through. After one hell of a filibuster by Wendy Davis earlier this week, Governor Dick Perry (yeah, the one with the hunting ranch called "Niggerhead") announced a special session called next week to pass SB5, an overhaul on abortion law which would ban all abortions after 20 weeks and close 90% of women's health clinics, effectively eliminating women's choice.
Let's set the moral and ethical arguments for abortion aside for a moment, and just acknowledge that most unwanted or untimed (whoops) pregnancies occur among lower income communities with a higher (as much as 20%) percentage of those pregnancies occurring among Black and Hispanic women. Hold that thought in your mind for a moment while I shift gears.

Also happening earlier this week, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned several key components of The Voting Rights Act of 1965. What does Texas do the same day?
Texas announced shortly after the decision that a voter identification law that had been blocked would go into effect immediately, and that redistricting maps there would no longer need federal approval.
Voter ID laws disproportionally affect the poor, and the poor are disproportionally non-White. Redistricting is the process by which lawmakers determine who their constituents are. It is also an oft-abused method to disenfranchise voters, particularly poor, Black, and Hispanics districts.
So officials had already blocked the Voter ID law in Texas because they felt it violated the Voting Rights Act. Rather than change the law so that it does not target minorities, Texas just waits for the VRA to be gutted.

Let's also set the moral and ethical implications of enacting the Voter ID law and partisan gerrymandering for a moment, and simply add what's been happening in Texas up. What they're doing is creating an increasingly disenfranchised populace and forcing them to have more children, meaning that the numbers of increasingly disenfranchised people will increase. How long do you think it'll take before that blows up in their face?

Setting morality and ethics aside, it's clear that Texas did not think this one through. Taking morality and ethics into consideration, it's clear that Texas is governed by assholes (Wendy Davis and certain other brain-using legislators notwithstanding).

No comments :