I’ve been changed somehow. I didn’t want to change, didn’t expect to change. But change has been forced upon me. I’m not numb, just sickened, politically sick to my stomach. No, I know this feeling, at first debilitating and silent. For months the feeling welled up from the pit of my being then almost needed to be thrown up. It’s me experiencing anger.
It’s my apparent delayed reaction to how unreasonable Texas and now other states have gone in the Republicans’ effort to make abortion, regardless of any reason, illegal. Texas should be ashamed of its additional ‘snoop’ clause, allowing anyone from anywhere to alert ‘authorities’ (lawyers) about the possibility of a female out here having an abortion and drag to court others guilty by association like public or private transit drivers. What the hell is that all about?
The conservative right-wing effort abolishes the guaranteed privacy of female Americans from adolescent to adult, 12 or 50, 10 or 45, 15 or 40. No exceptions for rape or incest. That’s the reason for half of all abortions.
The self-proclaimed pro-lifers—the same ilk who shot and killed gynecologists, harassed and shamed pregnant females entering health centers, and bombed and burned down women’s clinics—took leave of their senses back in the 1980s. But now … they’ve crossed into full-blown abnormal psychology likened to mass histrionics. It is immoral that men like these are running our state governments, and nothing can be done about it.
Why play hardball with this issue?
Our Texas Legislators and Governor have placed all their eggs, pun unintended, in one basket for the almighty vote. The one-issue voters. This deeply divisive, emotional, religious and controversial issue brings in the ‘hallelujahs’ by loud-mouthed religious conservatives with plenty of stones to throw. Sinless, are they? Not in my book. So unwilling to put their money where their mouths are, the conservative crowd is notoriously tight-fisted when it comes to tax dollars going to the births, hospitalizations, housing, feeding, healthcare, daycare and full education of babies born into poverty.
Don’t be cruel
Ironic this was the number one song of the 1950s, the era to which the political Right has wanted to return America since Reagan. Like the ’50s was the golden age of … what? Whiteness? That’s what it looked like to Baby Boomers raised on I Love Lucy, Dick Van Dyke, Andy Griffith, Beverly Hillbillies.
They want us to forget about the ’60s, man! They want us to pretend the pill and women’s liberation were never commonly touted among the middle class. They think women ought to stay home and raise their babies, that daddies never go away …
Time has marched on, and we are a changed people: more open, rational, loving, accepting, diverse, inclusive, empathetic, understanding. But Texas leaders don’t reflect that. No one wants to go back to the 1950s or even the 20th century. Yet accompanying my state’s drunken political power and mass insanity has come an ugliness and hatred I’ve never witnessed. It’s comparable to the story in To Kill a Mockingbird. That same furious vitriol but in the story against Black people, hated and downtrodden citizens living within the white characters’ Southern hometown.
But Texas’ hatred is bigger than race: This is hatred of women—half the U.S. population, actually more than 50 percent.
Today old white men dare think we’re just gonna go back in time with them to the simple days of the 1950s when women knew their place, were surely virgins before marriage, the double standard accepted, men wore the pants, wives smacked if out of line, abortion illegal and thousands of women dead every year because of it.
The BIG question about when life begins is a religious belief not a scientific fact. Pregnancy in its earliest weeks is tissue, not a baby. A third of all pregnancies end in miscarriage anyway, and even this tragedy has gained the cynical scrutiny of today’s empowered Republicans who’ve long suspected and now proclaim the cause to be not God’s but the woman’s.
In their moral certitude, the conservative Right will tell us life begins at conception, and that’s that. They’ll tell—I mean yell at—millions of girls and women they do not know or care about, “You’re gonna have that baby, you hear me?!,” the Southern way of ending an emotional argument.
Everybody hears them, from their lips to God’s ears. We bear witness to the consummation of power lust producing the most chauvinist, self-important, self-righteous, arrogant, indignant, ruthless, merciless, regressive, irrational Texan-American leaders—all who history will rank alongside our state’s and nation’s list of notorious bigots, racists, sexists, liars, hypocrites, kooks, and creeps.