Every two years the Texas Freedom Network takes a look at the Texas Republican Party platform because, as we say around here, that platform has become a biennial exercise in extremism. For several cycles now, the platform has been co-opted by far-right activists, and each platform can tend to look like a love letter to the extreme […]
Recent Blogs
They Didn't Do It to Protect Women's Health — #FightBackTX
When Texas lawmakers passed some of the nation’s most extreme anti-abortion legislation one year ago, they agued they were simply trying to protect women’s health. Abortion facilities were unsafe for women, they said. New regulations, such as requiring clinics providing abortion care to be ambulatory surgical centers and their doctors to have admitting privileges at area […]
Senate Republicans Block Effort to Overturn Supreme Court's Anti-Birth Control Ruling
All but three Senate Republicans voted today to block legislation preventing employers from imposing their religious views on workers who want access to contraception. The 56-43 vote failed to end a Republican filibuster against the “Not My Boss’s Business Act.” That bill would overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling in June that allows for-profit companies to refuse, for religious […]
SBOE Politics as Usual: Textbook Review Once Again Plagued by Lack of Expertise
The Texas State Board of Education will vote in November on new social studies textbooks that will be in Texas classrooms for the next decade. Earlier this month, official state review panels met in Austin to vet those books. As we did during the science textbook adoption process last year, the Texas Freedom Network researched who got appointed to the […]
David Barton Wildly Distorts Key Poverty Statistic
How do lower- and working-class Americans get duped into supporting right-wing public policies that do them economic harm? They listen to phony “experts” like David Barton — a former Texas Republican Party vice chairman and the head of the religious-right organization WallBuilders. Barton pretends to be a respected scholar of American history, but his grasp of facts is about as […]
