Texas Republicans Endangering Lives

By now you’ve heard and seen plenty of reactions and protests regarding the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and therefore allow states to outlaw abortions. What you may not have noticed is news reports of Texas women who have been denied treatment for miscarriages because our over-zealous and incompetent Republicans in the state legislature made it financially dangerous for a doctor to perform anything that might be construed as an abortion.

Marlena Stell, a Texas woman, carried the fetal remains for two weeks before she could find a doctor to perform what is commonly known as a D and C because doctors feared prosecution under Texas law. The recently passed law allows any idiot to claim the doctor performed an illegal abortion, hoping to collect a $10,000 bounty offered by Texas and the doctor would have to go through an expensive trial then even if they are found not guilty pay their own legal expenses.

Now let’s consider what continuing to carry around a dead fetus can mean. The dead tissue can break up and get into the woman’s blood stream causing infection that can result in death. In other cases it can cause damage to the woman’s reproductive system making them unable to have a future child.

Consider this thought experiment, take some ground meat about half the size of a meatball and wrap in cling wrap then hang it outside on a tree branch during the summer for two or more weeks, then go back and see what you’ve got. Now think about it would be like to have that inside your body as it rots.

Sure, in many cases the woman’s body expels the fetal remains on its own after a while, but all too often it doesn’t. As the husband of a woman who had three miscarriages I also know the emotional toll carrying around that dead fetus causes for the woman. Texas Republicans didn’t care enough when they wrote the bill outlawing abortions to consider the no doubt unintended consequences of their actions. I often hear folks blame it on men in the legislature but the reality is that all 13 Republican women in the legislature voted for the bill.

Part of Guadalupe County is represented by state senator, Dr. Donna Campbell who signed off on the bill without expressing the slightest reservation. She’s an emergency room physician and given her failure to consider the potential life threatening consequences of her vote I’m hopeful no one I care about ever ends up in an emergency room she staffs.

To compound the issue Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit challenging an executive order by President Joe Biden giving hospitals the right to pre-empt state abortion restrictions when there’s an emergency.

All that’s bad enough but unfortunately they aren’t stopping at abortion, Republicans are going after contraception as well. In Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion overturning Roe v. Wade he said the court “should reconsider” its past rulings codifying rights to contraception access.

The right to contraception was established in 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut case in which the court found that a constitutional right to privacy protected women’s ability to take birth control. That’s the same right to privacy which was the basis for Roe v. Wade in 1973 and dismissed last month.

In order to protect the right to use contraception in the United States the House passed a bill this month and not a single one of the 24 Republicans in Texas’ congressional delegation voted for it. We’ll have to see what happens in the Senate.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - July 27, 2022

Texas GOP Should be Careful What They Wish For

The Republican Party of Texas’ 2022 platform calls for special privilege for Christians and demands that Christian prayers, Bible reading and the Ten Commandments be returned to public schools. Aside from the fact that the same folks who claim to be originalists venerating the U.S. Constitution don’t seem to understand either Article VI or the First Amendment which make it quite clear that this nation is secular. There is a great reason with historical examples of why they should be happy it's secular.

Let’s start with our 13 original colonies. As the Church of England was striving to establish a single, uniform religion across the kingdom, colonial America was divided, each of the colonies being dominated by their own brand of Christianity. Anglicans, who conformed to the Church of England, populated Virginia. Massachusetts was home to the Puritans.  Pennsylvania was ruled by and filled with Quakers.  Baptists ran Rhode Island.  Roman Catholics had Maryland. From Puritan Boston’s earliest days, Catholics often referred to as “Papists” were banned from the colony, along with other non-Puritans. Four Quakers were hanged in Boston between 1659 and 1661 for persistently returning to the city to stand up for their beliefs. Anglican Virginia was the scene of notorious acts of religious persecution against Baptists and Presbyterians.  In 1771, a local Virginia sheriff dragged a Baptist preacher from the stage at his parish and beat him to the ground outside, where he was also horsewhipped.  In 1778, a pair of Baptist ministers were conducting services at the Mill Swamp Baptist Church in Portsmouth, Virginia where a gang of men rushed the stage and grabbed them, took the ministers to the nearby Nansemond River swamp, then dunked and held their heads in the mud until they nearly drowning them.

In the 1830s and 1840s, a wave of anti-Catholic violence broke out in the Northeast and elsewhere, mostly directed at recent Irish immigrants.

The Mormons were chased out of New York, then Ohio, then Missouri. A few years after settling in area of Illinois they named Nauvoo an anti-Mormon mob attacked the settlement on June 27, 1844 and burned it to the ground. They also invaded the jail cells where Smith and his brother were being held “morals” charges, and executed them.

Between 1933 and 1939, the period of the Great Depression, anti-Semitic fervor reached new heights in areas such as New York and Boston, Jews were violently attacked. Assaults, propaganda and intimidation were mostly carried out by special societies, like the Ku Klux Klan.

Televangelist John Hagee of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, which boasts of 22,000 active members, once claimed the Roman Catholic Church was the “great whore of Revelation,” a “false cult system” and the “anti-Christ.”

Temple Beth-El, in San Antonio canceled Shabbat services in-person and online last Saturday, July 9, due to security concerns presented by the local FBI office regarding threats to the safety of San Antonio synagogues. Anti-Semitic flyers appeared on residents' lawns in Alamo Heights and Helotes in February. The flyers have been tied to multiple anti-Semitic and neo-nazi groups.

The various Christian sects can’t even agree on the contents of the Ten Commandments let alone a single bible version.

Republicans who say they want a Christian nation might want to re-think that as President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are both Catholics as are six of the nine Supreme Court Justices: John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. So all those apostate Protestants here in Texas might just find they’re not so happy to have the Papists in control.

Progress of the Human Mind Requires Change in Law

Republican leaders and activists are found of claiming they want to follow the constitution as the founding fathers intended it 235 years ago. Many including those in Texas even want to reverse the 17^th amendment which changed the method of selecting United States senators from being elected by the state legislatures to being elected directly by popular vote of the citizens of each state. Of course, their interpretation of the constitution and the founders’ intent is often self-serving and just cover for their own desires much as their bible interpretations so often are.

So in this week in which we celebrate the Declaration of Independence which was written but a man who, while not among those who wrote the constitution, did influence it through his discussions with those who did write it, let us consider something else he wrote. Thomas Jefferson, flawed individual and slaveholder, was a thoughtful, erudite man of his times. One of his concerns about the constitution as expressed in a 1787 letter to William Stephens Smith, son-in-law of John Adams, relates to the lifetime appointment of members of the Supreme Court. “What we have lately read in the history of Holland, in the chapter on the Stadtholder, would have sufficed to set me against a Chief magistrate eligible for a long duration, if I had ever been disposed towards one: and what we have always read of the elections of Polish kings should have forever excluded the idea of one continuable for life.” Lifetime appointments when many of us now live into our 80’s and 90’s leave us with appointees who now routinely serve for 25 years or more. In the days of the founders far fewer survived even a decade on the bench. I don’t doubt that there are some advantages to experience and wisdom but at the same time spending so much of one’s life in such an elevated position often leads to a loss of touch with the world that the rest of us live in and the changes that have moved society forward.

In an excerpt from a letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816 which is carved on the Southeast Portico of the Jefferson Memorial, Jefferson is quoted: "I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

Until as recently as 1986, when Antonin Scalia took his seat on the bench, even Republican Supreme Court Justices considered the constitution a living document which allowed them to address Jefferson’s concerns without the upheaval and blood-shed of a revolution. Since then more members of the misleadingly named Federalist Society have been appointed and they’re anything but federalists in that they push against federal power claiming the states should make the rules, such as in the recent case known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health the six member conservative majority rejected a federal right to abortion in favor of allowing state legislatures to decide as they may. Leaving gerrymandered  and thus conservative controlled states like to Texas to essentially outlaw abortions even though the majority of Americans and likely Texans believes that abortions should be legal.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - July 6, 2022