Texas lawmakers are considering various bills affecting women’s access to birth control in the state, including whether to reverse the drastic cuts the Legislature made to family planning services for low-income women in 2011. So we wanted to drill deeper into the numbers from last month’s Texas Freedom Network Education Fund statewide poll. To our knowledge, this is the first public poll since the 2011 legislative session that examines what registered Texas voters think about the issue. Today let’s look at how Democrats, Republicans and political independents view the importance of access to birth control. The numbers represent percentages of those who think access is extremely or very important.
As you can see, most Texans don’t see access to birth control as a “culture war” issue. They see it as common sense.
Shared here: https://www.facebook.com/TexasWomensCoalition
Common sense should make you see that it is cheeper to have access to birth control then to have to pay for these children after they are born.
I support access to birth control. I urge you to move forward with this issue.
But it’s the primary voters who matter to politicians, right? The Republican who wins the nomination generally wins the election by default. I’m thinking that politicians in most Texas districts only have to serve their nominating base.
I keep hearing/reading this stuff about how Texans feel about access to birth control. There is no evidence to support this based on who Texans vote for. TX is a totally Republican anti-choice state. I have no idea where people are getting their “facts” from.
I think people are pro-choice but vote Republican because they don’t really know what that means (my mother in law, for example!).
Debra, if that’s true then people really are more stupid than I already thought. We as a country and society are the poorer for it.
I think in Texas most politicians only serve base that gets them nominated. Texans generally vote Republican without thinking, so politicians only need to cater to primary voters.
Omg Why are we still talking about birth control?!!!!! It is 2013!
Debra and Sherrie.
You are absolutely correct. East Tennessee has been solid Republican since the Civil War because Lincoln won the war. I swear. I’m not Joshin’. On Election day, people file like programmed automatons down to the polling places, and pull the nob for the GOP. They don’t know why they do it. They just do it and expect all of their neighbors to do it because: “That’s what my pappy did, and his pappy before him, and his pappy before him, and his pappy before him.
I once asked my father-in-law who he was going to vote for: the family man Democrat or the Republican who had three wives, two gay lovers, an arrest record a mile long, and two possible child rapes under his belt. My father-in-law went into deep silence and thought for a few moments, then looked up and said:
“Well. The Republican candidate looks good.”
Not really. The choice was not like that, but that is what he said, and I feel fairly certain that he would have said the same thing if the Republican did have a black sheep record.
What I can’t understand is why any republican would be opposed to providing birth control to poor women. The alternatives are limited; 1) the possibility of abortion, which they hate or 2) having taxpayers pay to raise the children of the poor for 18 years, which they constantly rail against.
And this strikes right to the heart of an argument I’ve been making for some time – once cannot be both a fiscal conservative and a social conservative. It’s one or the other but not both. And that is why there is going to be a tremendous struggle nationally, in fact it seems to be starting already, for control of the GOP.
Of course it won’t matter much in Texas, where “republicans” just stick their fingers in their ears and squeeze their eyes shut tight.
That’s easy. The goal is for the state not to pay a penny for the uprbringing of those children (Remember: public (for free) education is evil by definition). If the kids end in prison, it will be a privatized one and shoveling tax money to the owners/shareholders of those IS a major raison d’etre for RW politicians.
Sherrie: The late Molly Ivins, who actually should be the patron saint of Texas, once said something like, “If the Legislature weren’t half idiots, it would cease to be a representative body.”
Anne: no foolin’! That war was actually over before I graduated from college. A long time ago……