So there's obviously been a lot of talk about the Texas GOP's craziness in their 2012 platform on wanting to eliminate the Voting Rights Act, bring back the gold standard and stop teaching kids critical thinking skills. But there's a lot of crazy that doesn't seem to have been covered yet.
The craziest provision I haven't seen discussed takes to new extremes the GOP doctrine that government regulation begins and ends at the vagina. This doesn't even involve abortion or birth control.
Gestational Contracts - We believe rental of a woman’s womb makes child bearing a mere commodity to the highest bidder and petition the Legislature to rescind House Bill 724 of the 78th Legislature. We support the adoption of human embryos and the banning of human embryo trafficking.
Oh, and they also favor a health insurance mandate (for temporary workers) and possibly RFID tagging non-citizens. (I seriously hope I'm misreading that provision).
The actual bill in question, regarding surrogate motherhood agreements (potentially for money), House Bill 729 (they got the number wrong) was passed in 2003 uncontroversially; they did not even bother recording a vote and signed by Governor Perry.
The bill is actually quite conservative (the "intended parents" of the baby have to be married, for instance, and either the intended mother's eggs or a third-party donor's eggs have to be used), but it does seem to allow a free market agreement paying the surrogate mother for, you know, carrying the fetus for 9 months, which I understand is not always the most fun thing in the world. But the GOP just can't keep its legislative fingers out of vaginas.
Now, the electronic privacy provision.
Electronic Privacy – We believe all law-abiding citizens should be free from government surveillance of their electronic communications except in cases directly involving national security, by court order. Except for non-citizens, we further oppose any national ID program, including the Real ID Act and the use of Radio Frequency Identification Chips (RFID) on humans.
The RFID chip implantation into humans, is one of those things that has a black helicopter conspiracy aspect, but being against it alone would be more run of the mill crazy. But it's not unreasonable to oppose pre-emptively.
But please, please reassure me that they're not, you know, in favor of implanting RFID chips into non-citizens in order to get into the country and only favor some form of national ID program for them. Although I guess it would save them the embarrassment of having to arrest another European auto executive; they could just scan his RFID chip.