Greetings from the People's Theocracy of Texas
If God had meant for women to have rights, they would've been born with a penis, no?
It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.
Anatole France
It’s easy to joke about what Texas is turning into. Lord knows I do it enough. After having lived in the Lone Star State for 10+ years (3722 days, not that I was counting), I think I have a unique perspective on what’s happening there, and I’m saddened by what Christians minus the “Christ” are doing to Texas. Then again, this is hardly a new phenomenon.
The Lone Star State is the worst example of all the things Republicans in red states want to do after Donald Trump gave them permission to be their worst selves. Texas Republicans, almost always the worst example of any state party, have gone off the deep end in forcing their agenda on the entire state.
It turns out that “Gilead” is Latin for “Texas.” Who knew, right??
Let’s just start with the “good” news: By the time the Texas Supreme Court last night overturned a judge’s ruling that she could have a medically necessary abortion, Texas resident Kate Cox was already well outside the court’s reach, having left Texas earlier in the day for an undisclosed free state where she can get the potentially lifesaving care she needs.
Cox last week became the first person since Roe V. Wade in 1973 to have to file a lawsuit to request permission to terminate a pregnancy, thanks to Texas’s near-total abortion ban. She and her husband, who have two kids already, had very much wanted the pregnancy, but the fetus was diagnosed with trisomy 18, an untreatable, lethal genetic anomaly. With help from the Center for Reproductive Rights, Cox sued, and Travis County District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble issued a temporary restraining order Thursday, ruling that because Cox’s life or ability to have a child in the future would be at risk if she continued the pregnancy, the abortion could go ahead, and state officials could not take legal action against Cox’s doctor, Dr. Damla Karsan, or others involved in providing the abortion. Cox has needed Emergency Room treatment several times leading up to and even since filing the lawsuit, her lawyers said.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was never concerned with Ms. Cox’s health, ability to sustain a future pregnancy, or her life. Women are merely vessels in Texas, intended to deliver and raise children. Easy come, Easy go.
(You can do that when you value women only for their ability to propagate the species.)
Paxton’s concern was his inhumane desire to ensure that he ensured that women were viewed under Texas law as things- property of men with no rights of their own independent from men. Suppose Ken Paxton, Gov. Greg Abbott, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have their way. In that case, Texas will become a Christianized version of Iran or Saudi Arabia…or what comedian Trey Crowder calls “Howdy Arabia.”
Attorney General Ken Paxton, a repugnant theocrat who’s been indicted on securities fraud and faced impeachment earlier this year, used Kate Cox’s turmoil to push his cruel, vicious agenda. He threatened hospitals and doctors that they’d not to give Cox an abortion or else they’d face punishment, then challenged the judge’s ruling, bringing it to the rabidly right-wing Texas Supreme Court, which halted the order allowing Cox to get an abortion while it made a decision.
Cox had to put her own health and well-being first and leave the state to get an abortion. That was wise because hours after her decision was made public, the Christian nationalist-dominated court ruled against her.
How horrifying is this? What if Cox didn’t have the means to travel? What about all the women who can’t afford to do so? And Republicans are now working on travel bans for abortion—and they’re working on getting abortion banned in states where it is legal.
There was a bill introduced in the Texas Legislature that would ban women from traveling out of state for an abortion using Texas highways. Presumably, using a four-wheel drive vehicle and traveling off-road or on dirt roads would still be legal, but the bill's wording hadn’t been finalized.
The Christofascists in the Texas legislatures will continue ramping up the anti-abortion legislation until they can make it illegal for women to even think about having an abortion while within the borders of the state.
Yes, thought crime. That’s where we’re headed, and if the technology was currently available, thinking about abortion might well be punishable by death.
Within hours of Judge Gamble’s order, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton interfered, claiming that Gamble had acted illegally under Texas law because since when is a judge a doctor capable of making medical decisions? (As opposed to a Republican politician or an all-Republican Supreme Court.) Paxton warned hospitals where Cox’s OB-GYN works that the doctor and the hospitals would be open to felony criminal charges, as well as civil suits under Texas’s “bounty” law, if they allowed the procedure. He also filed an emergency petition with the state supreme court, which on Friday put Gamble’s order on hold while it considered the case.
Monday, Cox decided that although she had hoped to recuperate at home with her family in Dallas if the abortion were allowed, it no longer made sense to wait on the state, and her attorneys at the Center for Reproductive Rights announced she had fled to a sane state, which they understandably didn’t identify. The attorneys also said they would continue to pursue her case in Texas, because justice, and within a few hours the Texas Supreme Court overturned Gamble’s order.
In its ruling, the Court wrote that it sure was sad, but tough luck:
No one disputes that Ms. Cox’s pregnancy has been extremely complicated. Any parents would be devastated to learn of their unborn child’s trisomy 18 diagnosis. Some difficulties in pregnancy, however, even serious ones, do not pose the heightened risks to the mother the exception encompasses.
Michelangelo Signorile makes an excellent argument that the current madness and oppression surrounding abortion in red states can be laid directly at the feet of Donald Trump. His promise that he would overturn Roe v. Wade and the three Supreme Court judges he appointed with that express purpose created an atmosphere allowing the Christian Nationalist movement to believe they were in a position to impose their will. And they’ve done it with surprising speed and ferocity.
No one should be surprised that the Texas Supreme Court overturned the restraining order granted to Kate Cox. Everyone sitting on the bench was appointed by Far-Right former Governor Rick Perry or current Governor and Christofascist Greg Abbott.
Impartial justice? It's more like frontier justice.
Besides, the Court held, Dr. Karsan, Cox, and Cox’s lawyers Did It All Wrong by seeking injunctive relief from a court.
A woman who meets the medical-necessity exception need not seek a court order to obtain an abortion. Under the law, it is a doctor who must decide that a woman is suffering from a life-threatening condition during a pregnancy, raising the necessity for an abortion to save her life or to prevent impairment of a major bodily function. The law leaves to physicians—not judges—both the discretion and the responsibility to exercise their reasonable medical judgment, given the unique facts and circumstances of each patient.
Of course, what the Texas Supreme Court didn’t mention is that doctors and anyone else associated with an abortion- down to the person providing a woman a ride to her doctor’s office- can be charged with a crime.
So, the law is just ambiguous enough to terrify doctors and medical professionals and for legislators to claim that the ultimate decision is still in the hands of doctors. Meanwhile, vigilantes can sue anyone even tangentially associated with an abortion for $10,000.
That’s not going to have a chilling effect at all. No sir.
As such, medical professionals are terrified that they may have legal exposure for any abortion-related services they provide, even if a woman’s life is at stake…because women shouldn’t receive medical treatment until they’re within an inch of death.
The Texas Supreme Court tried to cover its logic with some semblance of “reason,”
saying that the law doesn’t actually
ask the doctor to wait until the mother is within an inch of death or her bodily impairment is fully manifest or practically irreversible. The exception does not mandate that a doctor in a true emergency await consultation with other doctors who may not be available. Rather, the exception is predicated on a doctor’s acting within the zone of reasonable medical judgment, which is what doctors do every day. An exercise of reasonable medical judgment does not mean that every doctor would reach the same conclusion.
This is what might be called the “fuck around and find out” test, in which a doctor decides to perform an abortion they deem necessary to save a woman’s life…and then spends days/weeks/months living in terror, wondering if they’ll be charged with murder.
Only the Christofascists know for sure.
Who knew that practicing medicine in Texas would have approximately the same odds as playing the slot machines in Las Vegas?
See? Everything’s fine in Texas, the rules are clear, maybe, so doctors should just exercise their best medical judgment and find out if the courts agree.
And in the meantime, Kate Cox will get the care she needs. Texas’s awful abortion laws specifically do not criminalize patients who have abortions (at least not yet), although its stupid “bounty” law would allow any idiot in the state to sue anyone who “aids and abets” an abortion. We hope Cox drove herself to the airport and didn’t use a joint account with her husband to pay for the out-of-state procedure, because hey, why wouldn’t some ghoul try to win a $10,000 judgment against Cox’s husband, an Uber driver, or even some party who advised her to seek an abortion out of state?
These people are f*****g nuts, and not just because they believe God’s on their side. Three-quarters of the Texas Legislature, as well as the Governor and Lt. Governor, should be on heavy doses of Thorazine; it’s the only way to restore sanity to an intensely f*****g insane place.
Yeah, ask me how much I miss Texas….
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Yes, Texas while never a paragon of progressivism has now taken another step on the way to becoming Saudi Arabia southwest, or Howdy Arabia as you said. It's so debilitating to have to witness the continuing triumph of the Christofascists here, while the rest of the nation has scored victory after victory for abortion rights. I keep asking the rhetorical question, "what the hell will it take?" before enough people are fired up enough to surge to the polls and vote these cretins out of office. Not even the great frozen blackout of 2021, or the Uvalde elementary shooting in May of 2022 was enough to make voters turn against Abbott, Paxon, and the rest of them. I wish that I believed that the Cox debacle is going to move the needle, but I'm not confident. I mean I hope that I'm wrong, but I wouldn't put money on it. Damn Texas.