For those of us who are not from or do not live in Texas, it can seem easy to make a joke out of its politics and people. There are some incredibly strange, downright bizarre and very scary aspects to the world of politics in the Lone Star state but there is no denying its complexity or its political influence on the rest of the county. What’s really intriguing is how the state was once controlled by Democrats but for the last forty or so years has been in the hands of conservative Republicans—many of whom do not represent the will of the changing demographics of the state. And as Republican politicians in Texas continue in their quest to ruin as many lives as possible because they think their religion demands it, it has scary implications for the people of the state, of course, but also for rest of the country.
"What happens in Texas doesn't stay in Texas. ... Texas is a behemoth and it has an outsize influence on the direction of America and we have a responsibility, I think, as Texans to make sure that we take care of our state in a way that would enable us to be the proper custodians of the future of America."
It’s great to hear a Texan acknowledge this. Because their legislators are truly out of control right now and getting worse. Reproductive health, health insurance and education are just a few of the issues currently at stake. Voters need to seriously consider what’s good for them and the rest of the nation when choosing politicians and choose wisely.
The long-term goal of cultural conservatives is to cut off access to abortion in Texas, to end state subsidies for birth control, and to gut state funding for Planned Parenthood—which, in 2011, served sixty per cent of the health needs of low-income women in the state. The legislators slashed the family-planning budget from $111.5 million to $37.9 million. Eighty-two family-planning clinics subsequently shut down.
Texas has the highest rate of uninsured people in the nation, and, according to the Center for Public Policy Priorities, about seventeen per cent of Texan women and girls live in poverty. After the family-planning budget was cut, there was a disproportionate rise in births covered by Medicaid, because so many women no longer had access to birth control. By defunding Planned Parenthood, the legislature also blocked many women from getting scans for breast cancer and ovarian cancer.
It would seem like this is common sense. Then again, common sense isn’t so common. Legislators in the state want to stop women from having access to birth control but haven’t understood that this will result in more babies being born. Of course, that’s their religious aim, but it also comes with a significant price tag when women are forced to have babies they don’t want or can’t afford. This puts an unnecessary strain on women and families. But it also drains state services and funding—the very same ones they want to eliminate. This makes absolutely no sense. But they don’t care about making sense. And they don’t care about saving lives either. Their war on women’s bodies has resulted in hundreds of casualties.
In May, 2011, Governor Perry, who was gearing up for his first Presidential race, signed a bill requiring all women seeking an abortion to have a sonogram at least twenty-four hours before the procedure. Carol Alvarado, a Democratic state representative from Houston, pointed out on the House floor that, for a woman who is eight to ten weeks pregnant, such a law would necessitate a “transvaginal sonogram.” She then displayed the required instrument to the discomfited lawmakers: a white plastic wand resembling an elongated pistol, which would be inserted into the woman’s vagina. “Government intrusion at its best,” she observed.
Nonetheless, the bill passed in the House, 107–42. When the Senate approved the bill, Dan Patrick, then a state senator, declared, “This is a great day for Texas. This is a great day for women’s health.”
Between 2010 and 2014, the proportion of women who died in childbirth in Texas doubled, from 18.6 per hundred thousand live births to 35.8—the worst in the nation and higher than the rate in many developing countries. These figures represent six hundred dead women.
Equally shameful is how education in Texas is being impacted by extremely destructive decision-making by politicians. Kids are not getting the services they need. This not only does a disservice to them, but is detrimental to the state in the long run as these kids grow up and encounter obstacles because their education has been limited.
In 2004, the Texas Education Agency lowered the percentage of children who can be enrolled in special-education classes from thirteen per cent (about the national average) to eight and a half per cent (the lowest in the country). According to the Houston Chronicle, tens of thousands of children have been denied the education they need because of this arbitrary limit.
Also noteworthy is how Texas Republicans are obsessed with controlling the LGBT community and immigrants. A bathroom bill, for instance, was introduced in 2017 to ban transgender people from using the bathrooms and locker rooms of their choice in public schools and government buildings. And the state is all about various versions of “show me your papers” intended to crack down on undocumented immigration, having recently passed SB 4 which “attempts to abolish sanctuary cities in the state by making local officials who refuse to accommodate the federal government’s requests to help enforce immigration law criminally liable, and even subject to removal from office.”
But there is a way out this nightmare. If people understand that votes do matter, that politics and policies are also lived outside of elections, vote differently and work for change, it is possible to turn the state around.
Texas leads the nation in Latino population growth. Latinos account for more than half the 2.7 million new Texans since 2010. Every Democrat in Texas believes that, if Latinos voted at the same rate in Texas as they do in California, the state would already be blue.
Who knows if this is actually true? There are lots of factors that contribute to why people don’t vote and there is no guarantee that Latinos (or anyone else) will vote blue. But their physical, economic, social and cultural well-being definitely depend on electing different politicians from the ones who currently hold office. And if the rest of the nation is headed the same way as Texas, it means that our lives are on the line too.