Texas GOP Discovers Most 'Pro-Life' Position Of All: Execute The Abortion Patients
God, the amount that these people love life is just incredible.
In the grand tradition of George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 comes an exciting new addition to the genre of dystopian fiction. Sort of! It’s actually dystopian nonfiction. And it’s not a novel or a book, it’s the Texas Republican Party’s 2024 platform.
I would love to be overstating this for dramatic effect, but I’m really not. It’s a whole goddamned world of batshit. They want to require Texas public schools to teach “the Bible, servant leadership, and Christian self-governance,” they want to ban mental health screenings in schools and gender-affirming therapy for anyone under the age of 26, and they want to disenfranchise large population centers by requiring those who run for state office to win a majority of counties rather than a majority of the vote. This would mean that Loving County, which has a population of 64 people, would have the same voting power as Harris County, population 4,731,145 and that Democrats could never win statewide office again. They want to do the same for ballot measures.
They also want to make it legal for people in Texas to use gold and silver coins in “everyday transactions,” which, I’m sorry, is fucking hilarious.
Nationally, they want to bring back machine guns (pairs nicely with ending mental health checks in schools), repeal the Lacey Act so they can hunt and trade in endangered species, they want to repeal the minimum wage, they want to repeal the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (corporate transparency) and Dodd-Frank and the 17th Amendment (so that Senators will be appointed by state legislatures instead of selected by popular vote, to ensure more GOP Senators), and the 16th Amendment in order to abolish the Federal Income Tax, they want to amend the 14th Amendment to eliminate birthright citizenship, and the Johnson Amendment in order to allow religious leaders to tell their flocks how to vote and, naturally, the “strict adherence to the original language and intent of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutions of the United States.”
Oh! And they want to put people to death for having abortions.
That, friends, is what we are going to focus on right now. Even if my mind may keep drifting to the idea of some guy coming into a Texas gas station looking to buy a pack of gum with a fucking gold doubloon.
Plank 35 of the platform endows “the preborn” with “equal protection of the law.
We urge lawmakers to enact legislation to abolish abortion by immediately securing the right to life and equal protection of the laws to all preborn children from the moment of fertilization, because abortion violates the United States Constitution by denying such persons the equal protection of the law.
This is Texas, so, as Jessica Valenti points out on Abortion, Every Day, this would mean that those who have abortions or perform them could be sentenced to death under Texas law. Laws that give fetuses “equal protection” mean that those who have abortions or provide them could be charged with homicide. In Texas, homicide means the possibility of the death penalty.
And it’s not as though this just slipped in without notice or that Republican legislators are even bothering to deny that this is what they want.
Last week, for example, Republican state Rep. Stephanie Klick attacked her primary opponent David Lowe, saying, “the legislation he prefers would give the death penalty to women who had an abortion. I don't support that.” Lowe responded by insisting, “What I support is the Republican Party of Texas platform on abortion which is the same laws that protect you and me to protect everybody else to include pre-born children.”
Just to be very clear here … THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A PRE-BORN CHILD.
That’s not a thing.
To make matters even more abjectly horrifying, the Texas Republican Party is also very clearly affirming its desire to “protect” fetuses with fatal fetal abnormalities that are incompatible with life.
From the Texas GOP Platform:
We support legislation such as the Preborn Non-Discrimination Act (Pre-NDA) to close existing discriminatory loopholes that fail to protect preborn children suspected of having a "fetal anomaly" or disability, and we support legislation to enact anti-discriminatory language to apply additional protections to preborn children at risk of being aborted because of their sex, race, disability, or age of gestation, in addition to providing families with information about life affirming social and medical services available to them in Texas, such as perinatal palliative care. We support protecting preborn children and their mothers by stopping abortion pill distributors from sending and trafficking these lethal and illegal drugs into Texas and holding those accountable who break state Pro-Life laws by selling and trafficking illegal abortion pills.
Truly, these people live in a fantasy world.
The platform also includes a provision that would require Texas students to be taught a bunch of insane anti-abortion propaganda, because of course it does.
We support requiring Texas students to learn about the humanity of the preborn child, including life-affirming definitions of life and the study of life, the concept that life begins at fertilization, milestones of fetal development at two-week gestational intervals, use of fetal baby models, witnessing of a live ultrasound, viewing the following videos: Meet Baby Olivia, A Glimpse Inside, and Miracle of Life, and (for high school students) the contents of the Woman’s Right to Know booklet. In addition, students should receive instruction on the dignity of human life and the principles of equal protection that were instituted in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” as well as that "no State shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
These absolute creeps know they are in the minority. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t need to force their grotesque beliefs on school children, they wouldn’t need to gerrymander the vote like that. Everything they are doing and asking for here comes with the understanding that there are a hell of a lot more of us than there are of them, even in Texas.
PREVIOUSLY:
The age of 26 for denying gender affirming care isn't as random as it seems. It is the year that children come off of their parents' health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
Surely they won't actually overturn Roe.
Surely they won't actually implement abortion bans now that they've overturned Roe.
Surely they won't actually execute any women who have had abortions.
Don't be such panicky Patricias!