U.S. companies lash out at Texas law changes, including abortion ban
reuters.com
reuters.com
I'm from across the pond, and have spent limited time in the US - none of it in Texas - but I always thought that I had a pretty good handle on things American. I went to a UK school, from age 7 to nearly 18, which was run by Americans.
I've never got the whole gun thing, but it's never bothered me. However, the recent stuff - abortion and voting rights being eroded - has just knocked me sideways. I'd have said they were un-American. Now, I don't know what to think. I really mean this. Was I always wrong?
On the voting law I think it's reasonable in most places. Poll-watching isn't a problem, and ID requirements aren't a big issue. I disagree with the law in that people should be able to distribute mail-in ballots since the new ID requirements make them more resistant to fraud. Not sure what you mean about removing electoral rights. I am, however, bothered by the fact that it (and most other voting laws) are driven by "stolen election" lies, which is almost worse than people trying to hang onto power (which they've done with re-districting/gerrymandering for a long time already).
Doubtful. So-called "pro-lifers" are also, generally, against other forms of birth-control, including pills and condoms.
Also, even if they did believe that an embryo is a baby, that doesn't make it so. What they "believe" (or say they believe) shouldn't matter; what matters is what is.
In any event, I don't think being against birth control suggests the belief that a fetus deserves the rights of a child is necessarily implies the belief is in bad faith. Or at least, no more so than believing that murder should be a crime but supporting policies that indirectly lead to more murders (e.g. supporting policies that increase poverty or gun violence).
The more interesting gotcha for me is when pro-lifers concede an exception for rape. I don't think they believe a child born of rape is somehow less deserving of life than a broken condom. So that suggests the belief is less about simple life and death and more about a person's sexual choices.
I don't think it's that, but rather a realpolitik reason: a new bill that contains such an exception is easier to pass into law.
You might need a source on this one. This certainly applies to some religious types, but is it a "general" truth for people who would pass the heartbeat law? A law which still allows abortion but identifies a test for when life begins? I don't think so.
Funny, that's the exact same strawman OP was talking about.
And things aren't so simple. You cannot demonstrate the unborn are sentient anymore than animals. We cannot demonstrate that either. We choose to err on the side of the unborn out of fear if we're wrong.
I actually know a farmer who only eat his pigs when they die of old age (he use them to find mushrooms, expensive mushrooms), pigs being very successfull in front of the mirror test and definitely sentient and more self-aware than a 4-year old, i wonder if he took that into consideration.
I for sure don't care, but if i was forced by the law, i would stop eating meat without protesting, so i guess win for the overall suffering and win for the climate? Maybe your church is onto something.
I understand that the things you believe are facts, and the things others believe are opinions?
Whether abortion is murder is a strictly philosophical question, not a scientific one: there are a lot of facts to consider (beyond religious principles and thinly veiled misogyny) but they are only as relevant and decisive as one considers them.
I should have been clearer. What we are really questioning is what counts as a human life. These days many babies that would have died from premature birth can be delivered early and survive; that line moves further back in pregnancy every year.
That's a very weird take on the issue, specifically because I agree with you in many respects, but that is exactly why abortion is a very complex issue.
The fundamental question is "when does individual human life begin?" Yes, pro-lifers believe that it begins at conception, but why should their beliefs take precedence? I don't believe at all that an early embryo/fetus at 6 weeks is "an individual" in the human sense, where abortion would equal murder.
Of course, the problem is that when a fetus does become a full-fledged human is a gray line - pretty much everyone believes it occurs at some point between conception and birth, but where you draw that line is why this is a difficult, complex issue, not the "simple" one you seem to believe it is.
If on the other hand this is about punishing women for having sex, then they would try to prevent access to BC, as it removes the risk of pregnancy, and would have exemption for women who were raped because they didn't do anything worth punishing.
Of course I haven't seen anybody who is against abortions arguing that we should make spare kidney donations mandatory, despite the fact that people (who are, without a doubt, people) die waiting for a transplant. If you are not willing to make that argument, I don't see how you can logically argue against abortion.
[0]: I am not claiming that some individuals don't hold that belief.
So when does it start? When does it go from cells to alive inside the mother? No answer. Activists will shout "my body" all day but clearly there may be a second living entity that is not their body.
Nobody is willing to come propose a rational concept of when a baby's life begins. I suspect, these days, because it would result in a determination similar to Texas'.
Activists also say it's "men controlling women's bodies" but never acknowledge that half the voters are women.
I'm not even pro-life. But none of the pro-choice takes are in good faith. If you want to be perceived as rational and therefore be more convincing, (1) acknowledge that it is not a men-vs-women topic, and (2) propose a sane test for when life begins. Seems so bizarre that so many people supposedly believe in "science" but cannot figure out (2).
Yeah that's my point. I don't know why it's an odd complaint. "Men trying to control women's bodies" isn't true and turns an ethical debate into something about sexism, which means we don't get closer to an answer because we're not working on the right things.
> whatever we pick involves some kind of value judgment, right?
This only seems true because it is already the case that the answer affects our lives as human adults having to take action based on the answer in our particular cases. If we lived in some other universe where abortions were impossible (e.g. they always kill the mother for some reason), it seems like we wouldn't have that difficult enough of a time identifying when life begins in the fetus.
What's funny is that because the answer affects us and we won't drill down into narrower ranges to identify specific criteria, this also makes our understanding of all other life more ambiguous. Because if we did identify when frogs, or elephants, or seedlings turn from cells into life, it would have obvious implications for humans.
> first trimester abortions should be safe/legal/accessible" seems like a fine place to start, and go from there
It seems like this is exactly what Texas has done. It went from there.
Again: even in "pure" science, you are generally making value judgments when studying stuff like "what makes something a member of a species", "what counts as a life for the purposes of this study", etc. E.g. a scientist may use the biological, ecological, or evolutionary species concept to study a population of organisms, depending on what question they're trying to answer. There is no "objective" answer to what a species is; it depends on what question you're trying to study. Similarly there is no "objective" answer to when life begins; someone can pick "at conception" or "at first breath" or whatever, and then we have to have a value discussion about why that, why not something else? See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma..., which argues well (in a different context) how this sort of thing works.
The Texas law is far more restrictive. Six weeks is much shorter than first trimester.
From an ethically perspective it would be significant if those expectations and obligations could be replaced with voluntary acts in an universal way.
Whether or not questions around abortion "disproportionally affect" women is not the question. Abortion also disproportionately affects aborted babies, if you believe they're alive. 1-year olds also disproportionally affect women. Should we be able to kill children until the age of 5? Why not?
I think your take from the perspective of categorization is one that tries to blur things intentionally. It may be the case that an organism does or does not "objectively" belong to a race. But that does not mean that the specific attributes of that organism are themselves not objectively measurable. You're just talking about what definitions are being used.
I think that argument is an attempt to derive ethics from words - rather than discovering the scientific process, deciding ethically what is appropriate or desirable, and identifying the language which should be used to describe it. It's backwards.
At some point a fetus goes from necessarily relying on the mother, to being self-sustaining (if fed) even if removed from the mother. That's a knowable thing. If the baby is removed it will either live or die and that is our answer. Call that life, or independence, or whatever. The lens you choose may change where the line is for you, but not when it is crossed.
I would say that if you believe that children should not be killed post-birth, then you are already cognizant of some kind of threshold that exists which is eventually crossed and cannot be undone, after which adults are obliged to attempt care and continued life of the child.
Because we don't have a way to test exactly when a fetus becomes independent, we use heuristics. For the most part, the first trimester we consider dependent; the last trimester we consider independent; in the ambiguous middle trimester we err on the side of the preference of the already-living, and in some places allow abortions through this time even though there may be a chance that the baby is alive and independent.
But these are just heuristics. "The Texas law is far more restrictive." Yes, it is. But you also said "Go from there" and that is what they did. Texas narrowed to a specific criteria that its people perceive to better approximate the threshold for life. "Life" being in this case a catch-all amalgamation of lots of peoples' concepts that mostly approximates the ability to self-sustain under care. It would seem on the surface at least that an organism without a heartbeat is dead-on-arrival while one with a heartbeat at least has a chance.
The way past this for a place like Texas is to propose a new testable threshold and explain why it is not possible for a self-sustaining baby to be exist before then.
I did not say the policy's disproportionate affect should be the sole consideration; I did say it's worth considering, because in practice the vast majority of ethical questions are not simple binaries; we have to weigh competing needs/desires/etc and decide what the best course based on all the factors at play.
My intention is not to "blur things intentionally" but to encourage thinking about this in a less black-and-white way, and explore some unexamined (arguably irrational!) assumptions that seemed present in your original post. For instance, you said:
> When does it go from cells to alive inside the mother?
...with the implication that answering this will give us a "rational" and correct answer to the ethical question. But there is nothing about <i>this framing itself</i> that is objective or rational. Knowing that a life <i>is</i> at some point (via whatever scientific definition we've chosen) doesn't tell us what <i>ought</i> be done about it; in general you can't derive an ought from an is; you could <i>easily</i> instead reframe the ethical question as "is there some point when a fetus's life is more important than the woman's bodily autonomy," and come up with a very different set of heuristics for answering the question. You can pick an objectively measurable line but the choice of what that line is, and what to do about it, are not a thing that can be objectively chosen.
My intended point wrt Texas is that, based on the discrepancy between polling data and the law as written, it seems like the representatives in Texas have passed a law that is in fact <i>more</i> restrictive than what the majority of voters want; ergo, I don't think it actually reflects the majority's intuitions on when abortion should be OK. But this really isn't my main point; I'm mainly trying to point out this isn't a question that can be solved solely by finding some science answer, and an attempt to sway voters solely on that type of argument seems not-correct based on everything we understand about how people in modern democracies make such decisions.
Assuming that a foetus is a child, why should the mother have a legal obligation to keep it in her body? If it existed outside her, but required a kidney transplant to live, would she also be legally obligated to give it one? As far as I am aware that procedure is at lot less dangerous/damaging to a womans body than a pregnancy.
I can't see a logical argument against abortion that doesn't require any person to give up a kidney that a stranger need.
A parent does have an obligation to feed and keep healthy a child that cannot care for itself. There is such a concept as criminal negligence. For example, parents have been charged with manslaughter after they provided an insufficient diet for their child. [0]
> why should the mother have a legal obligation to keep it in her body?
I'm not sure that she does. She could theoretically take it out and raise it outside of her, but that would be quite bizarre and greatly increases the risk of criminal negligence and improper care. Babies are forced out early all the time, when the doctors recommend it if the baby is late.
[0] https://www.news-journalonline.com/zz/news/20191121/vegan-fl...
We can take the view that as long as the child is inside the mother, then the mother's choice trumps the right of the child to exist. After all, the mother's body is hosting the child.
Or we can take the view that rights of life immediately after conception is sacred and must be upheld.
Or we can take the view, that the fetus is considered a human being after some X amount of time in the mother's womb. Maybe until the umbilical cord is developed and nutrient-transfer, pseudo-breathing begins ? Or maybe only within the first trimester ?
I actually don't know what is the right decision. Though I am personally more in the line of "My Body, My Choice", but that includes vaccination. (even if I am fully vaccinated).
I wish humanity developed artificial wombs and full social support system from baby to adulthood so this question goes away.
Courts have zero problems legally binding men to that act.
The question seems to be:
"When is a fetus considered a separate life?" or perhaps "When does a fetus become a baby?"
That's a lot harder to define than you might think. (At least that's the argument ...) Pro-life people tend to see a cut and dried answer to that, where Pro-Choice people tend see it as a bit more ambiguous.
I'm pro-choice, it just seems like a truth people don't want to acknowledge.
The pro-abortion side just doesn't like the answer.
My stance are controversial but hear me:
Their is two solutions. First: abortion law as they exist (abortion whenever you want during the first semester + if there is a disease until the middle of the second semester). Pro-lifes don't like this solution, i get it.
No abortion at all, or the real pro-life solution: the woman should get a full salary from the state and her replacement training paid as well when she is pregnant and that state prevent her from functionning. If she is a student, she will receive the median salary of the state she live in, and have a sabbatical, allowing her to return with no penalities. Top medical aid provided free of charge to avoid complication, and if she can't take care of her child, a fully-funded child services will be in charge of finding a foster home once 6 month of breastfeeding (paid, of course) are done.
The only downside left is the lack of career evolution from a working woman who lost 2 year to scale up the corporate ladder, i agree, this is still punishment for unprotected sex, and cesarean can scar the body. I am not a woman, did not go through a pregnancy and childbirth, so a woman knowing this could add a lot more to the idea, but you understand, yes? If the State interfere to protect the foetus, it should do its best to protect the child-bearer for negative consequences of this interference.
[0] And by that i mean: birth control did not work, mister did not pull off quick enough, they wanted to have a kid but someone have had infidelity and now the couple want to split...Lot of nice cases.
That's the only option for men who want to be sure to avoid legal obligations for the act.
For example, just a few weeks ago, the world's most premature baby (with 0% chance of survival at the time, completely unviable) just had his 1st birthday.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/06/23/prematur...
On the other hand, perhaps technology will advance to the point where even a fertilized egg could grow outside the womb. Then abortion might turn into "take this thing out of me and find somebody else that wants it."
In other words, it’s not murder, and is ethical, to pull the plug on someone who’s hooked to your body to survive, if there is no other way to save them.
This is a very enlightened stance imo, and inductively implies abortion will one day be both illegal and in low demand.
The point is if you decide a mother has a right to cut the umbilical at any time, the fetus will die regardless during most phases of pregnancy (the ones where abortion is legal in the US.) So now you get to decide given death is a certainty, what is the proper act. I could be persuaded the current mechanisms are the wrong choice. Would you propose to just cut the cord and let the fetus starve in the womb?
However, that aside, my point is that once you take death as inevitable, then the mechanism to do may fall to minimizing suffering. And so, it stands to reason that a procedure which a) doesn’t result in long, perhaps painful starvation and b) doesn’t put the mother at risk by having a dead fetus inside of her are worthy considerations. I do think that you are right to think that the violence of current procedures, while perhaps ethical due to minimization of suffering, may be contributing to moral confusion about the right to cut vs right to kill or the dehumanization of the fetus. I do fear that as this moral confusion winds it’s way upward, the rights to abortion may expand beyond viability, which to me would flip my position on where I stand with regards to maintaining the legal status quo vs reversing it. I support Roe v Wade but would not support a law which gave a mother discretion to terminate past viability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_(criminal_law)
If it's clear the mother went to the woods to create this environment to kill the child, then a state could consider prosecuting.
If there was a plane crash and it was clear that the mother was distraught and this was a side effect of the crash, I don't think most states with prosecute, but again, depends on the state.
Funny how no one cares they're murdering billions of baby fish by eating pregnant fish and caviar.
If you caused a car accident which lead to the other person needing a kidney transplant that only you can provide should you be required to give up a kidney? I don't see how abortion is different. Either way you made a risky choice that you knew could cause someone's life to be dependent on you. That doesn't mean you're forced to save the person.
Just stop digging this hole deeper, please. You are misusing the term "parasite" and I imagine you may, later in your own life, come back to these remarks with a distinct feeling of shame.
I shuddered a bit reading this. By this logic, at any point where I am dependent on someone else for my survival in passage (say an airplane) the principle in the relationship (the pilot or airline) has a right to kill me?
If that’s the logic, then we can squarely see that we have chosen to punish those who have any responsibility in that situation. Re: wrongful death
You might say, well but then that means the mother could "abort" a baby that's 2 years old or was just born or something. Well I'd say sure in a state of nature. But since we have a society we don't have to kill the child and someone else can just take care of it.
I think there are some reasonable parameters. Conception? Not reasonable to call that murder. A week before birth? Yea that looks a whole lot like murder to me. I don't think most reasonable people who are ok with abortion would see the argument that the mother has an ultimate right to destruction when so close to birth. But where they give, anti-abortion proponents take and get to the point where you start banning contraceptives and don't allow someone who maybe is safely having sex and a condom breaking to get an abortion.
And this is saying nothing about the stupid website like it's some sort of intellectual purge under Maoist China or Stalinist Russia. This is exactly the kind of thing that authoritarian regimes love or would love to implement and it's easy to see the slipper slope toward, well, why don't we start reporting people who are suspected of being "white nationalists" or Christians?
This is a valid position to hold, but hardly a non-controversial one. We have, as a society, agreed that the state’s role is to step in to defend the defenseless in cases of large power asymmetry, as would be the case here. Indeed this general principle is usually a leftist position.
> Either way you made a risky choice that you knew could cause someone's life to be dependent on you. That doesn't mean you're forced to save the person.
Actually it does (speaking generally, not to your specific example). Criminal or civil negligence is a thing.
Voting against our own interests because we’ve been whipped up into a frenzy by religious zealots and hardline partisans is very, very American. I don’t know exactly what you mean by “wrong”, but I suppose if you mean “should I have seen this coming?” I’d probably say “Yes. The writing has been on the wall for years.”
This is pretty much exclusively true of sheltered relatively affluent (“middle class” in popular use, but including the upper income end of the working class) people born around 1980 who reached social awareness in the brief local minimum of general social division (but an not of partisan political division, which was gearing up quite hard at the time) of the mid- to late-1990s.
Everyone else, pretty much, was already aware of the underlying divisions, even if they were enjoying the brief respite in the immediate palpability of them.
I bet my life it wouldn't have happened if the UK gov implemented the same workers protections and immigration rules as Germany, for example.
Wait 4 years, or 2 years for a recall…
If it means that you can't say anything about a large group of people, I'm not sure I agree, given that most countries can agree on enough things to be governed. I'm not exactly sure what the point of the argument is.
Anti-abortionism has always been a core pillar of the GOP's social policy because it's highly popular with the religious demographics that make up much of their base, even people who might otherwise not vote for them (e.g. some Catholics). After a Republican president had the chance to seat 3 judges, it's logical that red states would start a war against Roe v. Wade. We saw this coming as soon as Trump got his second SCOTUS judge, and when RBG died the writing was on the wall.
No matter how strongly I feel about abortion, the election stuff is more acutely concerning after seeing the degree to which powerful state- and local-level politicians were willing to kowtow to Trump and repeat his baseless lies in the fallout from the 2020 election. These are political hacks with zero regard for the integrity of our electoral process, and with some changes to local election law (like we've been seeing across the country, predicated on lies about election fraud), they may just accomplish in 2024 what they were trying to do in 2020. I would call it a relatively new trend, and it is fucking frightening. They are learning that the more they corrupt the process, the less anybody is able to hold them to account, and their mendacity and depravity seem to know no bounds.
>I would call it a relatively new trend, and it is fucking frightening. They are learning that the more they corrupt the process, the less anybody is able to hold them to account, and their mendacity and depravity seem to know no bounds.
Yes, this.
It is something that I would never have expected in the US, because, to me, "unAmerican".
When I was growing up, I was extremely conscious that although I was British by birth, my entire family was Irish (from the republic). I fielded a lot of crap from people on account of my parents' accents etc; there were lots of problems in the UK because of IRA attacks etc.
My go-to place, my haven in my head, was that the US (although I realised even when growing up that many Irish-Americans were pro-Republican and supported extremism in the cause of a united Ireland) was bigger, better and as a nation above partisanship, seeing a world picture and being the leader in championing rights and fairness. Yes, a bit cut-throat and market-driven, but always in pursuit of equal opportunity and fairness.
I'd imagined that the US would lead the world into a higher plane - by example, and by sheer economic force: "you need our money, you toe the line".
Anyhow, I still cling to my childhood dream of America and Americans coming through for the rest of the world. In simplistic terms, as I saw that dream, that everyone deserves the same degree of respect because of our common humanity.
To restate my original sentiment, perhaps I was just wrong.
For abortion, it’s comes down to this: do you believe a fertilized egg is a baby, and it’s equivalent to murder? And if you do / don’t, at what point are you ok with it?
Lot of people here believe it’s a baby at moment of conception, so any abortion is murder. Lot of people also believe it’s the woman choice, it’s her body. These two opposite forces tug and pull and you end up with shit like after six weeks it’s illegal.
Other European countries are more conservative. And the vast majority of jurisdictions outside Europe are even more conservative than that.
But that info is nowhere in the news, or even on the Wikipedia page that just lumps all countries together that allow any abortions by request.
This is 100% a media-driven issue.
Until this week, Europe was more "Red State" on the issue than Texas. All other red states continue to be.
Yes, due to Roe and against the concerted effort of their Republican politicians. If the Texas law cannot be challenged then Roe is done, and those red states follow Texas’ suit.
What a disingenuous comment.
More conservative than roe or casey is made out to be radical, and based on the laws of the rest of the world, that's absolutely not the case.
IMO any view point between the first cells are already a human being to it becoming a human at birth are valid. Why not settle this in a referendum once and for all? If the vote is close to 50-50 maybe a more regional referendum would make sense to maximise happines with the outcome.
Unborn people are unique because they are entirely dependent upon a mother to survive in a way that cannot be replaced.
The human right to life is not absolute, at least under current law: a person who literally requires your body’s metabolical processes to survive is not entitled to that, and so we have decided the provider has the choice to cease providing it at anytime, with the stipulation that at the time the decision is made, they cannot choose mechanisms to end it which unnecessarily harm the recipient.
In that same framework, wouldn't a hospital be also allowed to turn of life support as it sees fit?
Also re: hospitals, this moral framework has no real analog given the nature of pregnancy being unique. If there were other phenomena where we could become biologically attached (without full intention) to others to sustain them through our own biological functions, then the same legal and moral frameworks seems like they would apply to those scenarios - but I am not aware of any such situations.
I would say for full consistency with this it would imply abortion providers ought to take steps to not directly inflict harm, but practically speaking death is assured under this framework and so perhaps that falls onto questions of suffering vs painless death.
Edit: To be more direct, the killing is considered acceptable since the alternative is less acceptable: namely, that a person who is providing biologically, metabolically bound life support to another via an umbilical cord is not permitted to cut that cord of their own agency, under penalty of law.
Personally, when I came to US as an immigrant it was very cheap and easy for me.
And in my home country in Europe everyone needs an Id to vote and no one complains.
Much has been written on this topic. I encourage you to do a little research before jumping to conclusions.
From the top link to a simple google query [1]:
• Rates of identification-ownership are highest among White individuals, while other ethnic groups disproportionately lack necessary photo ID. Thirteen percent of Blacks, 10 percent of Hispanics, but only 5 percent of Whites lack photographic identification. • Lower-income individuals are less likely to have photo ID. Twelve percent of adults living in a household with less than $25,000 annual income lack photo ID, compared to just 2 percent in households with over $150,000 annual income. • Young adults are less likely to have photo ID: 15 percent of 17-20 year- olds lack photo ID, and 11 percent of those ages 21-24 lack photo ID.
[1] http://www.projectvote.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/AMERIC...
I think there is actually an obvious good compromise here - Require Id for voting if and only if 99.5% (should be set by specialists) of county’s population has an Id. If the county doesn’t meet this threshold (I’d imagine most poor and republican counties) - don’t require it until it meets the threshold. Obviously people not being able to get an Id is somewhat an urgent problem that needs fixing.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-really-in-the-texas-votin... What’s Really in the Texas Voting Law Progressives are crying ‘voter suppression,’ but here are the facts. By The Editorial Board Wall Street Journal Sept. 1, 2021 6:38 pm ET
...
The Texas bill isn’t a blockade of the ballot box. The two most-cited provisions will ban 24-hour voting and drive-through voting, practices that weren’t even used until last year, when one county tried them in a pandemic. It isn’t crazy to think polling sites are likelier to attract trouble, or at least suspicion, at 3 a.m.
Early voting in Texas will be able to run from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., or Sundays from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. In some places, mandatory hours will go up. The bill says six Sunday hours will be required in counties with 55,000 people. The current rule is five hours in counties over 100,000. The new ban on drive-through voting has an exception for people with physical difficulties.
Texans using mail ballots will ID themselves by writing a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. That’s far less subjective than asking election workers to eyeball signatures. If the ID number is correct, the signature will be “presumed” valid. If the ID is wrong or there’s another problem, the bill provides a process to fix it. Goofs will be correctable until “the sixth day after election day.”
The bill is 75 pages, but here are some other bits that won’t make headlines but will help voter integrity: Every two years the state will audit four random counties. Ballot harvesting “in exchange for compensation” will be banned. Counties with more than 100,000 people will have to live stream video from their central counting location. Mail votes will be reported separately on election returns.
Election administrators will be barred from sending unsolicited absentee forms, though candidates and parties can do so. Courts will “instruct” newly convicted felons on their changed voting rights. Official correspondence with voting-system vendors will be deemed generally “not confidential.”
Democrats object that the bill empowers poll watchers. It also requires watchers to take a state “training program” and an oath that they won’t “disrupt the voting process.” The bill will make it a crime if an official “knowingly refuses to accept a watcher” or “knowingly prevents a watcher from observing an activity or procedure the person knows the watcher is entitled to observe.” The key word: “knowingly.”
Too short of a timeline.
> Mail votes will be reported separately on election returns.
This is a poison pill you can't see.
Democrats have always been more likely to use mail in ballots because they are more likely to be in a position where going to poll isn't feasible.
So if the mail in votes lean one direction, and get reported separately (especially in a way that delays them) then republicans can attack the legitimacy of those votes.
Texas is gonna end up turning blue here soon and they want to make sure they can attack the legitimacy of that.
It's a ridiculous expansion of restrictions clearly targeting the way city dwellers vote, while trying to leave alone the way rural people vote.
I care deeply about rights, but I suppose I cannot count myself among the enlightened; I cannot condone abortion since there is no way to ascertain beyond reasonable doubt that the unborn are not sentient people. And in my opinion, showing an ID to vote is just reasonable considering all it's other uses.
Erosion of rights in America is occurring recently through draconian executive orders that mandate behavior without due process. If Texas passes a law through due process, that's your problem not theirs. I don't mean to surmise what across the pond means, but if you're looking for dramatic erosion of rights look to Australia.
Visiting the US the first few times did demonstrate a cultural diversity that I hadn't actually realised until I was there. However, I grew up in London and, the UK being tiny, spent time in Birmingham, Manchester, Bradford and many other places that were culturally diverse - if by culturally diverse one means race, religion, cuisine etc.
I thought that America had an overarching sense of being American that transcended its constituent cultures - in a far more concrete sense than "Britishness", whatever that means.
Let's be honest. An Indian, Chinese, Pakistani - French person, even - arriving in Britain in my youth had little expectation of aspiring to "Britishness". There really isn't such a thing. But those people heading to the US had something almost tangible - again, overarching - the idea of Americanness that transcended everything. Class, culture, status, no matter. The American dream.
Or, perhaps, I just watched too many films - ahem, movies - as a kid that advertised this message to the world.
But even discarding the rose-tinted goggles of youth, I still think that there was a genuine spirit of an American ideal that held true until, perhaps, only a few years ago. I can't imagine the American people just sitting idly by and watching it be torn apart from within.
2) What greater equalizer is there in a self-defense situation than a firearm? If you are an average woman being attacked by an average man, what out there is a greater equalizer and application of stopping force than a firearm? If you are a man being attacked by a stronger man what is a greater equalizer than a firearm? The US has in excess of 300 million firearms, an estimated 800,000 to 3,000,000 instances of defensive use of firearms a year. Each of those numbers is massive in comparison to the miniscule number of gun homicides (approx 14k) or even gun related suicides (30k) per year according to the last study the CDC did on guns. Maybe it's not the guns that are the problem. Maybe it's a very select set of people who use the guns that are the problem?
3) In the US, to do anything of larger consequence (buy/lease/rent a vehicle, purchase a house, rent an apartment, purchase alcohol, enter certain buildings, travel by plane, buy a firearm, in some cases file taxes) you need an ID. Why is so ludicrous to suggest that voting be something that unilaterally requires an ID? Over 3/4's of the nation's minorities support voter ID. https://news.gallup.com/poll/194741/four-five-americans-supp... It's starting to look like I will need a vax pass just to go to a restaurant. Why is this such an issue?
EDIT to try and make more readable
Texas has been growing rapidly in some areas, the thing is though is the political redistricting which means those voting power may skew towards those in rural areas. So if you see, for example, a technology company in a city like Austin trying to evangelize connecting to community to flip the vote, it might be effort done within a vacuum with less effectiveness than perceived.
(Yeah, parent comment has changed.)
A large factor is immigrants that went through the tedious years long drudgery that is the legal process for US citizenship being really pissed at the fact some may not have to go through the aforementioned like they did - misery loves company or something like that.
Another is that these immigrants and minorities are typically fairly uneducated and truly believe the man with the golden shitter is actually like them and is going to help them.
And some of it is trying to fit in with the preexisting community. If you're a brown person in a town of white religious/nationalistic fanatics that typically do not like brown people, vowing your loyalty to their guy is typically a quick way to fit in a bit better.
I know reddit isn't representative of the state but both /r/austin and /r/texas have had this conversation many times.[0][1] I personally agree with the thesis that Texas GOP see's the demographic writing on the wall and want to limit to more liberal immigrants.
And because I already saw a comment mentioning it, I want to add that as a Mexican born and raised a border town I think the flipped Hispanic counties on the border are an anomaly. If you investigate the counties, like Zavala, that flipped, they are 1 largely blue collar men which love Trump (my roofer uncle), and 2 Zavala was actually one of the few counties that LOST population according to the 2020 census. The correlation is visible, the counties that had the highest population decline in Texas voted most heavily for Trump while the fast growing suburbs are now purple and blue. In this booming state the poor counties losing money and people are the ones voting GOP.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/phszk7/anyone_sudde...
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/texas/comments/pgjze1/anyone_else_g...
This is a dangerous fallacy. As has been widely reported, Trump increased his standing with minorities in 2020 vs 2016. In some heavily Hispanic areas along the Texas border the swing toward Trump in 2020 was over 40 points compared to 2016.
If this citizen enforcement truly is an end run on the constitution, there's no reason not to use that. And just like this Texan law, jurisdiction doesn't matter. If Washington State bans guns, hate speech, wealth,cars and implements Sharia law, it can be enforced around the country. If there's nothing unconstitutional about the way this Texan law is implemented, then the constitution is little more than a tissue in a tornado.
> Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction.
This has been reaffirmed in many subsequent rulings.
Edit: but look at that language. "Without excessive government restriction." Sounds like "Congress shall make no law," doesn't it? Constitution doesn't say I can't sue you for exercising your rights, eh? Limitations are for governments.
Then there's the rabbit hole that is judicial review. And if constitutional protections need not be explicitly mentioned, why can't States assert that the right of judicial review is theirs, without the need to overturn or continue to respect Marbury v Madison.
So parent's arguments stand, if this law stands, free speech and gun rights could be aborted (hehe) by just making them civil cases and giving people the right to sue.
edit: In fact, democrats have tried to do just that, by giving gun violence victims the right to sue the gun shop and gun manufacture. I (and bernie) have opposed such bills, for the same i (and bernie) oppose this bill. its a shortcut around the constitution that shouldn't be allowed to exist.
[0]: its not as simple as this, but thats the jist of it. this is why a civil case can result on the state forcing you to give up money/property without a ruling by a jury, and why the state can force you to pay if you want a jury in such civil cases, but can't in criminal cases. As another example, civil asset forfeiture gives the state the power to take your property without a ruling by a court, let alone a jury, with no need to prove anything, instead requiring you to prove legality. criminal asset forfeiture already exists and requires both of those things, but isn't used in favor of the civil version.
Companies halt political donations.
"Not like that!"
You can't escape politics.
Companies Stay Quiet on Texas’ New Abortion Law https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/business/companies-texas-...
Oh, wait.
Some life is simply incompatible with life.
In essence, you can in fact get some of them to agree with the things like abortions in extreme circumstances such as trisomy 13, but then they're just being hypocrites, because they earlier stated that any abortion is murder. In the end, they show their true colors of mostly just wanting to control women and minorities, and the politicians just keeping a downtrodden and uneducated voter base that they can dangle a "vote for me and I'll help you" carrot in front of for life.
That would be a real first step in fighting this law.