A “mob.” That’s what so many of our elected leaders think about citizens who came to the Texas Capitol in recent weeks to demand that politicians stay out of their private decisions about whether and when to have children.
Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, in a sneering email to his supporters late Friday night, boasted about the state Senate’s passage of legislation that puts government between pregnant women and their doctors. This supposedly “small-government conservative” proudly declared that the Senate passed the bill “within earshot of a roaring mob” — meaning the thousands of concerned women and men who filled the Capitol and the steps outside.
That wasn’t a “mob,” Lt. Gov. Dewhurst. It was democracy in action. It was the sound of outraged citizens exercising outside the Senate chamber their First Amendment right to free speech.
This morning the reality is that far-right extremists and their allies in the Legislature have succeeded in ramming through passage of their latest attack on women’s health care. They have hurled vicious insults — “feminazi,” “terrorist,” even “murderer” — at Sen. Wendy Davis and others who oppose their agenda. Their contempt for women’s health care has been so great that they even cheered law enforcement officers who confiscated feminine hygiene products before allowing citizens to enter the Senate gallery on Friday.
The staff of our incredible coalition partners — Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, Annie’s List and The Lilith Fund for Reproductive Equity – were the unsung heroes of the incredible mobilization of Texas men and women over the past month. We have been proud to stand with them and with the women of Texas.
But this fight has been just one battle in our fight against right-wing extremism in Texas. For 18 years TFN’s mission has been to expose and counter that extremism in the Legislature, at the State Board of Education and in local communities across the state.
Even now, TFN staff are preparing for the State Board of Education’s adoption this year of science textbooks for Texas public schools. What happens at the state board this will year will determine what a generation of Texas students learn about evolution and climate change in their science classrooms. And TFN will lead the fight to keep creationism and other junk science out of those classrooms.
We hope you will join and support us as we work for a better Texas — a Texas that rejects extremism, respects women’s private decisions and puts the needs of Texas students and their families ahead of divisive political agendas.
You can support the Texas Freedom Network by clicking here to make a donation. We pledge to use whatever gift you can afford to continue fighting back against the intolerant, intrusive and dangerous policies of right-wing politicians and their extremist allies in Texas. And we’re confident that, working together, we will build that better Texas for all.
What do these Republican thugs have against women?
Texas should hide their face in disgrace..least the men in Texas and world wide FORGET who birthed them..when you stoop so low as to EXPOSE what should be considered ” women’s hygiene products of her ” private parts ” and ridicule them publically..well for sure the HEROES DIED at the ALAMO !! what is in the STATE CAPITOL today and the ” governor’s manison is a dispectible excuse for a man…would he have exposed hos own Mother in such a manner ? I think he would have.
I’m sure the British called the American colonists a “mob”, too!
and look what happened to Marie Antoinette when she didn’t pay attention to the mobs…
“Unsung Heroes”
http://monicas-politics.blogspot.com/2013/07/unsung-heroes.html
Read the lead post at this blog:
http://okfaith.blogspot.com/
Thanks Charles, As a recovering Southern Baptist, I particularly appreciated the historical references concerning the origins of the Baptist church in America. I left the church when the hard core evangelicals took over. Maybe they were in charge all the time, and I just grew up.
Actually, not so dbtexas.
The extreme fundamentalist wing of the SBC took over in 1979. Even as late as about 1986, I was still able to read an official SBC Sunday School lesson that took the position that the world is obviously much more than 5,000 years old and evolution happened. Even though the minority fundie wing of the SBC, and they were a minority, took over in 1979, they were not able to fully consolidate their power over seminaries and missionaries until about the year 2000. According to accounts I have read in books and in on-line papers by former Southern Baptists who were pushed out, this consolidation of power was done ruthlessly and with all the meanness that “an enemy of God” deserves. I think those accounts are just a small programmatic preview of the much greater atrocities that would occur if the Religious Right were to take over everything in the United States.
Have a new perspective. Those difficulties are not happening to you. They’re happening for you. Just smile and say, “Thank you, Lord. I’m going to shine a little bit brighter today.”