Pour one out for the bigots in the Lone Star State! Yesterday, their Show Us Your Junk bathroom bill died in committee, and a federal court threw out two of their congressional districts for discriminating against TexMexicans. How's a Texas bigot supposed to survive in the face of so much reverse racism? Sad!
Texas Governor Greg Abbot called the legislature back for a 30-day special session that started July 18. Abbot's priority was a bill to reduce local property taxes, which also crashed and burned. But Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick led the pitchfork brigade against transgender Texans.
Dan Patrick, the manliest man in all of Texas!
Patrick's rallying cry: 'Tis a far better thing that a thousand transgender kids get beaten and assaulted than to have one of our precious daughters feel a little uncomfortable for a few days until she gets used to peeing next to someone who was born with a weiner.
Okay, not really. He and the God Botherer Coalition vomited out some hateful nonsense about men in dresses victimizing girls, ignoring the fact that 12% of trans people have been harassed, attacked, or assaulted in a restroom in the past year.
The Texas Senate looked at that data and said, NEEDZ MOAR HATE CRIMES! So they passed the Show Us Your Junk Law, requiring people to use the bathroom corresponding to the gender on their birth certificates. Because nothing could go wrong in an open-carry state with bigots demanding to spot-check a transgender person's birth certificate against his/her pink bits!
And as strange as it feels to be typing this, Big Business rode in to the rescue! After 51 Fortune 500 companies, 20 of which are headquartered in Texas, came out against the bill, it died in the Texas House. Per Dallas Morning News,
Rep. Byron Cook listened to hundreds of [individuals opposed to the bill]. But the outcry from industry was the game changer, he said."What has changed is the business community has weighed in publicly," Cook, R-Corsicana, said. "That's a huge difference."
As chairman of the State Affairs Committee, Cook decides whether the bathroom bill lives or dies. On Tuesday, he told The News it's "unlikely" the legislation will get a hearing before the special session ends next week, all but guaranteeing its demise.
The Show Us Your Junk for Jesus Coalition yammered on about "Daughters over Dollars," but the Texas House ended up siding with the IRL dollars over the wingnut fantasyland daughters. And God Bless 'Em for it!
Graphic by The Dallas Morning News
And speaking of people to keep away from your daughters...
Guess whose Corpus Christi district was ruled unconstitutionally discriminatory! Why it's our old friend Blake Farenthold, who DOES NOT have wet dreams about that redheaded staffer he fired, and who is very sorry for threatening to shoot Susan Collins for not murdering Obamacare. And who left the house in footie pajamas with ducks on them and let someone take his photo, FFS!
Republican Congressman Lloyd Doggett's district was also ruled unconstitutional. But he is a boring white dude who never leaves the house in his jammies or asks female staffers if they have semen on their dresses. He does preside over a district which was specifically drawn to "crack" the minority vote in Austin, though! So he is also BAD! ETA: And wonderful reader Panika McD has rightly schooled us that he is a Democrat, and it isn't his fault that Republicans can't get rid of him so they jam all the minorities into his district!
Attorney General Ken Paxton has vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court on grounds that two of the judges are named Garcia and Rodriguez, and only one of them is called Smith like a normal person. But Texas has been dragging this case out forever, so the Court has ordered them to start redrawing the district maps by September 5, 2017. We'll have to wait and see whether the Circuit Court stays the order to redraw the map, or lets them use it again for the 2018 election cycle. It would be a goddamn shame if Texas had to redraw Congressman Footie Pajama's district and the Messicans voted him out!
[Dallas Morning News / Dallas Morning News, again / Texas Tribune]
Look, Wonkers! We found a nicetimes story during the Dark Ages of Trump! Drop a coin in the till, maybe we can scare up another nice story!
