Texas is a very welcoming state, and we want everybody to be here, but....

You just can't expect to be welcomed with open arms if you're LGBTQ, eh?

You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power—he's free again.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Двести лет вместе

As a proud ex-Texan, I understand why someone would want to leave the Lone Star State. And that was before Gov. Greg Abbott decided to turn it into something close to Gilead from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. Now it’s even easier to understand why someone who’s not a White Conservative Christian heterosexual might find Texas a profoundly inhospitable place to call home.

Sure, there’s the matter of the electrical grid, which is in tatters and wholly inadequate to the task of serving a state with the population of Texas. Still, Gov. Abbott has done nothing to ensure the grid is upgraded, so it’s possible that people could die this summer or freeze to death this coming winter. The reasons for that have to do primarily with incompetence and corruption.

If it’s broken, why fix it if Greg Abbott’s cronies are still making money off of it?

But there’s something even worse that Abbott and the rest of the Texas Taliban have used to make Texas even less hospitable to those unfortunate enough not to be White Conservative Christian heterosexuals. They’ve made Texas an almost literal Hell for the LGBTQ community and women of childbearing age.

Women are a much tougher group to assist due to the sheer numbers, but the LGBTQ community has an ally who’s made it his mission to help them flee Texas if that’s their decision.

DALLAS (KXAN) — The end of this month can’t come soon enough for Paul Lewis. He’ll get to hand over the keys to his house in a Dallas suburb and start a long drive north, where he’ll become the latest LGBTQ+ Texan to leave the state in hopes of finding a friendlier place to call home.

“Part of me hates the fact that I’m leaving Texas, the home I’ve always known,” Lewis said, “but part of me is also excited by the fact that I get to start a new chapter.”

The lifelong Texan committed in January to begin looking for somewhere else to move. He explained how two factors ultimately solidified that decision, pointing to the growing number of LGBTQ+ restrictions introduced this legislative session as well as the frequency of deadly mass shootings happening in the state. He noted his home in Carrollton is 20 minutes from the Allen Premium Outlets, where a gunman killed eight people in May. Plus, the governor recently signed a bill into law that would ban transgender minors from receiving certain health care options to help in their transition.

“I don’t feel like Texas is my home anymore,” Lewis said simply.

He ended up selling his home through a real estate service launched last summer by the Dallas-based broker, Bob McCranie, who sought to help LGBTQ+ people list their homes in Texas and then connect them with an agent in another state or even a different country where they’d like to go next. McCranie initially called it “Flee Texas,” but soon changed the name to reflect a broader group of people expressing interest in the service.

“What we discovered was we got so much response from other states that we decided to expand and become ‘Flee Red States,'” McCranie said Tuesday. “We’ve helped 27 groups of people so far get out.”

When Texas- the place you’ve called home your entire life- is actively passing laws that make you and people like you feel unwelcome, how can it continue to be home? How much can you continue to take when it’s being made apparent daily that you’re no longer welcome? When do you finally acknowledge that Texas no longer wants you and it’s time to go?

Whether you call it “Flee Texas” or “Flee Red States,” LGBTQ people recognize that their homes are no longer places where they can feel comfortable or, in some instances, safe. That being the case, at what point do you concede the inevitable and decide the time has come to find a place where you’ll feel welcome and safe?

One transgender Texan and their family relocated to New Zealand. With parts of America being the shitshow it is now, leaving it altogether increasingly seems a wise choice.

When someone goes to the website FleeRedStates.com, a message reads, “As LGBTQIA+ citizens in Red States, many of us feel at risk. Current laws are highly discriminatory against trans youth and their families. Our marriages, our families, and even our safety are at risk. If you feel the need to leave the jurisdiction of a Red State, let us help you sell your property here and connect with you an LGBTQIA+ or ally agent in a better location of your choice. We are licensed in Texas and we have affiliates in all 50 states and several countries.” People can share their contact information to create an account and start the process of connecting with a real estate expert.

“We’re calling it kind of the ‘rainbow Underground Railroad,'” McCranie said. “We’re trying to get people out quietly and get them to someplace where they feel safer.”

Sadly, in many cases, red states have become havens of hate in the name of Christianity, as many state legislatures have decided to progressively outlaw certain classes of people. It’s disgusting, immoral, and un-Christian, but that hasn’t stopped lawmakers in red states from pursuing their hateful, homophobic agendas.

Gov. Abbott, of course, fails to see the threats inherent in the policies he and his fellow Texas Taliban members are pursuing. He remains convinced that Texas is a very welcoming environment. That’s probably very true- if you’re a White Conservative Christian heterosexual…but not nearly so much if you happen to be LGBTQ.

The governor held an event Thursday to sign a bill that will bar transgender women from playing on female sports teams at the collegiate level, which expands upon a law passed two years ago in Texas. KXAN asked Abbott to address its reporting that dozens of people are leaving the state because they said lawmakers keep pursuing these kinds of laws. He responded to a question about what he would say to LGBTQ+ Texans who assert they no longer feel welcome here anymore.

“Texas of course is a very welcoming state, and we want everybody to be here,” Abbott said. “So much so because the policies we promote, Texas over the past decade has been the leading state in the United States of America people choose to move to for our policies, and we will continue to advance policies that protect children, that protect women in sports but protect all Texans and their freedoms.”

Yeah, “we want everybody to be here”…just as long as you’re not LGBTQ, right? Because Texas is only a “very welcoming state” if you happen to be a White Conservative Christian heterosexual male and don’t have a wife, sister, or daughter of childbearing age who needs an abortion. Then you’re going to have some problems, pardner.

Gov. Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, along with the rest of the Texas Taliban, have made it very clear who they prefer to be emigrating to Texas. They want people moving in who will help them maintain their unquestioned hegemony over the Lone Star State. They want White Conservative Christian heterosexuals…and if you’re not, they’d prefer you not vote; thank you very much.

After working in Texas real estate for more than 20 years, McCranie called it a “sad thing” to change his business to now help people leave the state rather than put down roots here. However, he said he has no plans to stop it anytime soon because he still worries which LGBTQ+ restrictions the state’s Republican leaders will pursue next.

“What we all want as human beings is to feel a level of safety, and if your state is making you feel unsafe, there’s no reason to stay,” McCranie said. “I can’t believe somebody could look at, let’s say, California or New York versus Texas and Florida and say that LGBTQ people feel more welcome in Florida and Texas. Do you think that’s a reasonable presumption? Of course not.”

A woman who sold her home recently in the Austin area now resides in New Zealand, where she traveled to last week to reunite with her transgender son who’s in nursing school there. They decided to go somewhere overseas rather than another state because they’re concerned about a possible shift in the national political rhetoric against transgender rights.

McCranie told KXAN some of the people whom he helped through the Flee Red States service now live internationally, too, in places like Portugal, Mexico and Ireland. However, many of his clients moved somewhere else in the U.S.

I’d hoped- rather naïvely- that by this point in my life, America would’ve gotten past this hateful, exclusionary, I’m-a-superior-human-being bullshit. Sadly, if anything, it’s become worse. Much, much worse. With the screws being turned on abortion AND the LGBTQ community, freedom and liberty are becoming a thing of the past. Those who don’t fit neatly into the White Conservative Christian heterosexual box are quickly made to feel “less than” and marginalized accordingly.

When Lewis leaves the Dallas area at the end of the month, he’ll be bound for Michigan. He said it’s not only closer to some of his family, but state leaders there also worked to codify protections for the LGBTQ+ community. For example, earlier this year, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed a law that expanded the state’s anti-discrimination policies to include sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression. Under Texas state law, those remain unprotected classes despite efforts to change that by mostly Democratic state lawmakers and LGBTQ+ advocates.

As he spends the next two weeks packing up his belongings, Lewis shared what he hopes Texas leaders will take from hearing how their policies are making him and other LGBTQ+ people flee the state.

“You should honestly be ashamed with the amount of injustice that you’re bringing into the state of Texas because that’s not my Texas. That’s not the Texas I grew up in,” Lewis said. “My Texas was you are proud to be from here. You helped your neighbor. You were loving and kind, and you’re turning into something else because my Texas doesn’t feel that way anymore. I feel more hate brewing in the state than I have my entire life, and your decisions are making it worse.”

I lived in Seabrook, TX, a small town on the Texas Gulf Coast about halfway between Houston and Galveston between 1997-2007- 3722 days, all told (not that I was counting). The Governors were George W. Bush and Rick Perry, both Republican and relatively hapless. Texas was deeply Conservative in a typically crazy Texas Taliban kind of way, but it was nothing like what it is today. There’s a vicious, nasty edge to its Christian Conservatism that barely recognizes the importance of an LGBTQ person or a pregnant woman’s life.

I’ve been back a couple of times for visits, and I still follow Texas politics, but it’s not the lovable Right-wing circus it was back when Molly Ivins was alive (man, I still miss her). Now it’s a mean-spirited, angry, my-Jesus-is-better-than-your-Jesus, in-your-face, not-exactly-the-party-of -small-government.

The Texas separatist movement sounds like a better idea with each passing day… perhaps we should put up that wall at the TEXAS border, eh?