Texas Governor Abbott Letter on Gender Transitioning of Children: Read It For Yourself
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has issued a letter ordering Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate “any reported instances of these abusive procedures in the State of Texas” in regards to gender-transitioning procedures involving minors.
From the governor’s office:
Governor Greg Abbott today sent a letter to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) directing the agency to conduct prompt and thorough investigations of any reported instances of Texas children being subjected to abusive gender-transitioning procedures. The directive comes after the Office of the Attorney General confirmed that a number of so-called “sex-change” procedures for minors already constitute child abuse under existing Texas law.
“Because the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services is responsible for protecting children from abuse, I hereby direct your agency to conduct a prompt and thorough investigation of any reported instances of these abusive procedures in the State of Texas,” reads the letter. “To protect Texas children from abuse, DFPS and all other state agencies must follow the law as explained in OAG Opinion No. KP-0401.”
The letter notes that Texas law imposes reporting requirements upon all licensed professionals who have direct contact with children who may be subject to such abuse, including doctors, nurses, and teachers, and provides criminal penalties for failure to report such child abuse. The Governor’s letter also mentions that the law imposes a duty on DFPS to investigate the parents of children subjected to gender-transitioning procedures, and on other state agencies to investigate licensed facilities where such procedures may occur.
From the Austin American-Statesman:
The move came one day after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a written opinion defining gender-affirming care as child abuse under state laws — and months after state lawmakers considered but did not pass similar bills when the Legislature met last year.
Transgender advocates accused Abbott and Paxton of twisting state law to meet their political goals and biases, particularly after efforts to define gender-affirming medical care as child abuse died last year in the Texas House after passage in the Senate.
Religious and social conservatives praised the move.
“This (Paxton) opinion means nothing if it’s not enforced,” said Rep. Matt Schaefer, R-Tyler. “The truth is, though, that we need a special session immediately to address this now that we have the backing of the attorney general’s office. We are not going to back down on this — this is a hill we are ready to die on.”
Gov. Greg Abbott directed state health officials Tuesday to investigate reports of “gender-transitioning procedures” as child abuse.
The Texas Pediatric Society, Texas Medical Association and Texas Academy of Family Physicians opposed last year’s legislative efforts to limit gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers, which doctors described as reversible medication that delays the onset of physical changes to allow time for transgender Texans to consider more permanent options.
Several Republican bills also sought to outlaw hormone therapy involving testosterone and estrogen for minors. Doctors testified last year at Capitol hearings that the treatments introduce body changes that are permanent and are generally recommended after age 16. Surgery is generally offered around age 18 and never to young children, they testified.
Texas Freedom Network President Val Benavidez said the state action could deny “life-saving care for transgender youth.”
“Transgender people already experience stigma and discrimination, harassment and violence simply because of who they are,” Benavidez said, adding that politicians are using vulnerable youths as political pawns. “Regardless of opposition from child welfare and medical groups, Paxton and the Texas GOP continue to create barriers and laws that strip transgender children and their families of civil and equal rights.”
Equality Texas, an LGBTQ advocacy group, said all children deserve to grow up healthy and learn to take care of their bodies in a way that helps them live full, happy lives.
“For transgender kids, this might include gender-affirming care that has been endorsed by pediatricians and proven to help kids’ mental health and future well-being,” the organization said in a statement.
Abbott, in Tuesday’s letter to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, ordered the agency to conduct “a prompt and thorough investigation of any reported instances of these abusive procedures in the State of Texas.”
Read Gov. Greg Abbott’s letter for yourself here:
O-MastersJaime202202221358
This is not red meat for fundraising. This is forcing trans people back underground. It makes a mockery of the Constitution as well because if you have the right to reproduce under the 14th you have the right not to which means you should have a right to an abortion.
A$$holes. Evil unrepentant a$$holes.Report
The Texas primary that Abbott has to survive if he’s to be reelected is next Tuesday. Not fundraising, get your name in all of the papers for the next few days.Report
Forcing trans people back underground?
Try “killing trans kids”.
But what the hell, a few dead trans kids is a price a Republican is willing to pay to win a primary. Dead grandmas for the economy, dead kids for the primaries — it’s an effing blood cult.
(My wife’s a teacher in Texas. She’s had trans kids in her class. None of this is going to make them go away, fix them, or do anything but spike their suicide rates. It’s not hyperbole — kids WILL kill themselves because the one light they had in a difficult light just winked out to win one man an EFFING PRIMARY.
They just got told exactly what they’re worth.)Report
I am well aware. The aim is to make them vanish one way or another.Report
This is stupid and outrageous. It also won’t stand up in courts, and Abbot and Paxton know this. The citation they use comes from British law and it was overturned. This is posturing and trolling. I didn’t realize that the primary was next Tuesday, that makes it make all kinds of sense.
I would go to Texas and challenge them to prosecute me for child abuse, except nothing at all happened with my daughter until she was over 18. Which is pretty normal.
The things that ARE done with young children are so obviously beneficial that I would expect a summary judgement based on “do you have any evidence at all that the child was harmed?” Answer: No.
This is an opportunity to step forward with the stories I’ve heard about how important simple changes – name and dress, and then, eventually blockers, are to the happiness of these children. How simple observation of this can turn around the attitude of most adults.Report
Note that they just called nationwide medical practices — considered the best practices for this — “child abuse”.
What next? Vaccinating your child is child abuse? Seeing a therapist who isn’t a “Christian Therapist” is child abuse? Raising your child in the wrong church is “child abuse”?
If you can make “I’m gonna call a nationwide medical standard ‘child abuse’ and prosecute people for it’ stand up, what can’t you do? On a whim, apparently.
Eff this whole freaking state.Report
The one silver lining I see is that this does not look like the action of a man who is confident that he will be reelected this year. Texas has been slowly, slowly trending purple for a while now. 2020 was a good year for them and 2022 might be as well. However, Beto is no dope and they might have actually overshot it with their private enforncement abortion ban law in a real “leopard’s eating my face kind of way.” This could be another attempt to bring out the redmeat reactionaries. But it could also isolate a lot of businesses from conducting anything in Texas.
Other than that, everything Phillip H said is true. It is time to stop pretending that Republican politicians only play footsie with this stuff in order to distract from billionaire tax cuts. They mean it and want it.Report
“The one silver lining I see is that this does not look like the action of a man who is confident that he will be reelected this year.”
This is Ken Paxton worried he’s going to be forced into a run-off on Tuesday, one he won’t win. And his opponents are equally as bad or WORSE, but not as indicted.Report
Barbarous and cruel. This is meant to hurt kids. The phrase “cruelty is the point” but here it applies. This will seriously endanger kids. A question is whether we see other trans hating R govs try this in the next week or so. It happened with the Tx bucks for abortion law and other gov’s will be looking at the reaction.Report
The Republicans are like velociraptors testing the fences.
Even if this is thrown out in court, if this is received favorably by the base it will become Repubilican orthodoxy and be the model for similar laws in every Republican jurisdiction, and the Federalist judges will find a way to make it legal.
Don’t look at the courts, look at how this affects Paxton and Abbot’s standing with the base.Report
I have lots of kids, I know a lot about a lot, and I know darn little about trans. Ergo the bulk of people also know almost nothing.
He and they are appealing to the “it can’t happen to my child” crowd.
I guess I’m glad that we’ve finally decided homosexuals are too normal to virtue signal against. Not sure how long that will take trans.Report
“I guess I’m glad that we’ve finally decided homosexuals are too normal to virtue signal against.”
But, and this is important — they want to. Look at Florida — narcing on gay kids damn near made it into law.
They’re killing trans kids because they’re not allowed to beat the gay out of their children, but they haven’t stopped wanting to — and they’ll take any damn chance they have to go back to that.
And “beat the trans” out of kids is, sadly, not exactly abnormal. The dark irony is that the people Paxton is accusing of child abuse are the tiny minority who love their kids enough to do what’s best for them, to seek out experts and try to make their kids happy.
For a trans kid, the general response ranges from being kicked out, being punished relentlessly, being taken to church to pray it away relentlessly, being taken to basically conversion therapy (which is just as effective on trans kids as gay kids) to having the trans ‘beaten out of them’ by ‘toughening them up’, to…well, much worse things.
I know. My wife’s a teacher. She’s had at least one trans or non-binary kid every year the last decade or so. The lucky ones had parents who helped. Most had parents that didn’t know. A few…a few used school to hide from their parents. And a few never came back one day.
(FWIW, the increase in trans and non-binary identification mirrors the sudden spike in left-handedness. Turns out when you stop beating people for something, they occasionally will speak up)Report
There are three Republicans running for Attorney General in Michigan who think that states should be allowed to criminalize contraception.
They are probably outliers but what’s important is that they are still party members in good standing and will get millions of votes.
The Republican party has no boundary on the right. Nothing is “too conservative “for them.Report
But you don’t understand. They’re not real conservatives. Sure, they win Republican primaries and win elections as Republicans, but they don’t SPEAK for Republicans.
*eyeroll*.Report
“Two of the three Michigan Republicans who hope to be their party’s nominee for attorney general said Monday they oppose bans on contraceptives”
What happened is someone from the crowd asked them a question about a specific case, and then someone from left took what they said out of context.
So this was a political game of “gotcha” to generate a headline.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2022/02/21/michigan-gop-ag-candidates-criticize-1965-ruling-against-contraceptive-ban/6879175001/Report
In a statement Monday, Leonard said states shouldn’t ban contraceptives. His problem with the ruling, he said, was how the Supreme Court reached its decision. The justices argued the right to privacy wasn’t in the text of the Constitution but emanated from certain guarantees in the Bill of Rights.
“Our rights should be grounded in the Constitution’s text and tradition, not a judge’s feelings,” Leonard said. “That’s just common sense to everyone except fringe culture war activists like Dana Nessel.”
Mocking the right to privacy as “emanating from the penumbras” is a standard Republican joke that I’ve heard even here at OT.
Take that away, and any state can easily ban contraception.Report
Yes, and?
IMHO allowing contraception is great public policy. Being great public policy is not the same as being in the Constitution.
The Constitution is not the Bible, i.e. on every side of every issue. Constitutional has a meaning other than “I want it to happen”.
Believing “I want it” ergo it’s Constitutional is how we end up with the black letter Right To A Gun being spun as Not Really Constitutional.
The Early Constitution was written in a time where most men and all women didn’t have the right vote, slavery was allowed, and reproductive technology didn’t exist and wouldn’t for 50+ years.
It’s a great document. But I would expect that lots of foolish things are allowed by the Constitution.Report
Which is to say that, in the view of Republicans, there is no inherent right to privacy, nothing in the Constitution preventing a state from criminalizing contraception or abortion or for that matter, criminalizing sodomy or gender reassignment treatments.
This is what the original tweet was getting at. No gotcha, just a statement of fact.Report
We’re back down to shrinking the government until it can fit into your pants.
But that’s okay, I’m sure that’d never be used against someone like him.
Just gays (Florida’s narc on gay kids law just passed), trans folk (Texas), women (Texas)…..
F them, he gots his, right?
Hope whatever it is you actual value was worth what you sold for it, Dark.Report
If this holds, gay people are next.Report
I’ve been assured by Very Real Republicans who Very Truly Speak For the Party that that is not the case. They’re fine with gays. They’re just worried about the kids. (Despite the current “worry” being literally reworded anti-gay rhetoric from the 90s, which itself was reworded anti-black rhetoric from the 60s. Always about the women and children and how only beating down a minority will protect them).
And should any Republican, say Florida’s Governor, try to pass a bill to force teachers to out gay students to their parents, that’s just good parenting and also if it’s unpopular it’s not a True Republican Position, as Rick Scott is only a True Republican Speaking For the Party when he agrees with, say, Dark Matter.
It all makes sense when you realize that the actions of the GOP and it’s leaders aren’t true Republicanism/Conservatism. Dark Matter holds that standard, along with a vast majority of conservatives.
Somehow – -possibly via a liberal plot — people like Abbot and Scott and Trump keep getting elected, which is ABSOLUTELY the Democrats fault, and fine conservatives should not be associated with them.
Despite voting for them. And literally belonging to the same association as them.
Curse that weird minority of the GOP that keeps winning elections and their weird insistence they somehow represent Republicans.
And also @Tankie4Life, a 17 year old anarchist from San Fransisco is very much the thought leader of Democrats and anything he utters might as well be the party platform.Report
Similarly Team Blue can hold riots, burn down stuff, and it’s not “really” Team Blue that’s doing it.
Your side is truly virtuous and the other side is purely evil. No nuance allowed.Report
Gregg Abbot is an elected Republican state official.
Ken Paxton is an elected Republican state Official.
Rick Scott is an elected Republican official.
Ron deSantis is an elected Republican state official.
They speak for the Party they represent and the citizens who voted for them. Arsonists in Minneapolis speak for no one but themselves.Report
So is the claim that they have nothing to do with BLM or that BLM isn’t part of Team Blue?Report
Arson and looting in Minneapolis and other places where BLM protested were predominantly caused by the suppression of police. Blaming BLM for that is like blaming chemotherapy for opportunistic infections. I personally watched the liquor store across the street from my home get ransacked during the BLM protests. The ransackers- an assortment of suburban looking college kids (of various ethnicities, white black and Asian) after free booze and confident they wouldn’t get caught. The trouble making was distributed far and wide across the city- not localized to just places where the protests occurred.
If you have a big enough protest, and especially if the police are the subject of the protest, opportunistic trouble makers will act*. As for the BLM affiliated thinkers who were dumb enough to try and “justify” the violence post hoc? The right should cut those useful idiots a check.
*And the cops will welcome their mischief.Report
Note how Dark Matter has deflected from elected Republicans doing things to some things done during the BLM protests.
As I noted upthread: Dark Matters simultaneously believes elected Republicans don’t speak for Republicans, while also believing any random person speaks for Democrats.
Something he shamelessly and obviously went on to demonstrate.
Bluntly: DM either agrees with Republicans like Abbott and Scott — whose narc on gay kids law just passed — or he views dead gay and trans kids worth whatever he gets out of supporting the GOP.
As noted, he doesn’t want to talk about that. He’d rather act like a 19 year old protestor was the Democratic candidate for President.Report
RE: he doesn’t want to talk about that.
No, I’m writing up a post. It just deserves more time than I’ve had in the last hour.Report
Ditto.
All of the window breaking I witnessed was opportunistic hooligans long after the actual march had passed by.
If you want to see for yourself, seek out the KCAL helicopter footage of the vandalism at the Gower Gulch shopping center in Hollywood around June 1 .
The march passes by, and trailing after it was a few young men on bikes, casing the joint. After the march gets a bit further on, they signal to a bunch of cars waiting nearby and swoop in for the attack.
In other words, opportunistic hooligans with nothing to do with BLM.Report
In defense of the mostly peaceful protesters: those stores had insurance and they were only property.Report
As for the BLM affiliated thinkers who were dumb enough to try and “justify” the violence post hoc? The right should cut those useful idiots a check.Report
I guess I’m not surprised at the knee-jerk people who saw who was criticizing and started anti-criticizing appropriately, I am somewhat surprised at the politicians who made a big deal out of bailing out the people who made the word “mostly” an essential one.Report
Hmm? Which politicians? Most of the Dems politicians followed Bidens line of denouncing the violence and looting. Also, the demonstrations were mostly peaceful. If even a significant fraction of all those millions of demonstrators had gone non-peaceful, instead of the tiny opportunistic fringe that did, then there wouldn’t be two bricks on top of each other in a lot of major cities.Report
There’s that word again. “Most.”
Report
What, exactly, is your objection to this?Report
“Why are you defending the murder of Antonio Mays Jr.?!?!?”
“I’m not.”Report
Drop the passive aggressive voice and speak clearly.
What exactly is your objection to Harris’ tweet?Report
I did not post it because I objected to it, Chip.
I posted it as an example of a prominent politician promoting the bailing out of exuberant right-wing violent protesters descending on innocent communities of color and destroying insured places of business.Report
To be clear a broad assortment of BLM protestors got arrested, not just the looting opportunists. In fact I’m given to understand that the non-violent protesters were much more the focus of police attention and arrests than the looters were. Still I’d grant your example though I’d also note that she’s not affirmatively defending looting or violence- simply advocating for helping arrested BLM people make bail. So let’s split the difference and call it half a point.
And, to belabour the point, “most” is an accurate word. If those millions of protesters hadn’t been mostly peaceful those cities would have been levelled.Report
Oh, indeed. And, at the time, we didn’t know that the people engaging in violence were right-wing and so it made sense to defend them and ask questions like “but aren’t those places insured?”
But now that the immediate Trump problem has been resolved, there’s going to be a bunch of little “Wait, I thought things were going to go back to normal?” problems that keep bubbling up for the next few months.
Texas seems to think that it’s at the forefront of a preference cascade.
I’m *VERY* curious to see what happens over the summer.Report
Yup, and the BLM affiliated thinkers who were dumb enough to try and “justify” the violence post hoc? The right should cut those useful idiots a check.Report
It reminds me a great deal of the anti-abortion movement’s issue with shooting abortion doctors.
After the first one, for a while the movements were saying it was expected, justified, and of course their movements were mostly peaceful but abortion doctors needed to expect to get killed and it was their own fault.Report
I suppose. But 100% of murderers of abortion doctors were anti-abortion. A vast percentage of the looting hooligans didn’t give a damn about BLM. They just wanted to set stuff on fire and steal stuff.Report
Presumably there are “looting hooligans” who join BLM for that purpose and there are violence prone who are one broken window away from switching sides.
In addition, if BLM’s rhetoric is genocide and mass murder, then some take that seriously. Witness how the Wendy’s where that motorist was killed was burned down.
More importantly, if you’re a store owner and can reasonably expect looting and arson if BLM holds a protest over a certain size, these “not our people but our violence is your fault so get rid of the police now” statements look very self serving.
The “useful idiots” as you call them are taking ownership of the violence because it’s politically useful. It’s very thinly disguised blackmail.Report
A ton of these issues are ultimately driven by technology. Video is so omnipresent that police brutality can go down and we still enough trauma porn to keep outrage fires burning.
Outrage sells eye clicks and you don’t care if you alienate the other 90% of the population.
So every tribe thinks it’s under attack.
Trump was successful at channeling this but without the new technologies what he did would have been impossible.
New communication technology is driving all of this and a lot more. We’re still figuring what to do about it.Report
Even more absurd than I thought.Report
‘I have done that’, says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that’—says my pride and remains unshakeable. Finally—memory yields.
-Freddie (the other one)Report
When we put a microscope on the Rittenhouse shooting, big picture there were three groups of “protesters”.
1) Protesters who are only protesters. Mostly they left when the cops told everyone to leave.
2) Opportunists taking advantage of the lack of law. First guy who was shot was an apolitical lunatic.
3) People who support the Left and are inclined towards violence. That’s all three of the next three people shot at, it might be everyone in the crowd following him. Criminal records suggesting poor judgement and/or violence. At the extreme they might be extremists although those three weren’t. These are the people who are one broken window away from switching from for-real protesters into for-real rioters.
Now there’s also the problem that the first guy shot looked and acted like an angry protester and was assumed everyone in the crowd on all sides to be exactly that. So when the serial lunatic attacked someone and got shot, the violence prone true believers wanted to back him up.Report
All true but anodyne. We’re talking about big groups of people. You can support BLM and also be an opportunistic douchebag who sees an opportunity to knock over the local businesses or just set fires for the hell of it. Similarly there were no small numbers of people who supported the police actions and went to raise cain both for the fun of it and to make BLM look bad. You can draw the Venn diagram however you like. A subset of truckers up in Canada had a big ol protest in Ottawa over covid policy and suddenly the right discovered “hey people saying behaving badly reflect on the protest they’re sheltering behind isn’t fair to the protest”. It was magic!Report
“Similarly Team Blue can hold riots, burn down stuff, and it’s not “really” Team Blue that’s doing it.”
Which elected officials were those again? Which prominent Democratic politicians? Leaders? Anyone?
Jesus. Either you think we’re morons or you’re resorting to the most transparently dumb whataboutism to avoid thinking about the causes you’re supporting now.
I don’t really care what it is, you’re on Team Kid Suicide.
Lie to yourself all you want, but we’re not dumb enough to swallow an equivalence that effing stupid.Report
Yes. These policies are going to cause these sorts of problems. I don’t support them. Big tents group together people who don’t agree.
But for me to switch my vote I would need to support…
Inequality is a problem (because inequality) so the most successful need to be made less so. Equality of opportunity can be measured by outcomes. And various economic policies which AOC and Bernie are trying to claim are mainstream for Team Blue (I hope they’re really not) but amount to “true communism has never been tried”.
Both sides look equally corrupt and opportunistic so there’s that.
I agree with some aspects of both parties but if we’re going to measure the potential for damage then the socialists have quite a track record.
What I would like to do is vote for people who expressly say, and mean, that they’re for economic growth and indicate that they understand the issues that fuel it.
That’s still going to be a random-walk in terms trans rights. One vote with two sides means no matter which side your vote for there are going to be some ugly aspects.Report
Related:
GOP Arizona Guv Argues It’s Better To Have A White Nationalist In Office Than A Dem
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/republican-arizona-governor-doug-ducey-argue-better-white-nationalist-wendy-rogers-democrat-felicia-french
This is where the Republican Party is at this point.Report
Hardly. There are too many gays to make that reasonable any more. The entire point to have a tiny dangerous (but not really dangerous) outgroup that you can virtue signal against.
Similarly if women were open about having abortions there are so many of them that they wouldn’t be subject too political attack.Report
Why do you think women – especially well to do Republican women are not open about their abortion histories?Report
Humans have serious instincts to hide their sex lives and make fun of people who don’t.Report
and when you are part of a political movement that wants to criminalize sexual behavior, criminalize reproductive freedom (while claiming without a hint of irony that the 14th Amendment codifies a right to procreate) as well as persecute gender non-conforming youth (and gays and black people), why do you think well to do Republican women are not open about their abortion histories?Report
SCOTUS allowing the anti-abortion garbage to stand has really emboldened these criminals.Report
Here’s where the Republican Party is today.
Governor Steve Ducey of Arizona defends a white supremacist candidate as being preferable to a Democrat.
For all the “reasonable” Republicans, you can get off the bus anytime.
Or stay on and see where it leads. Your choice.Report
Update:
Gregg Abbot Wins GOP Nomination With Nearly 70% Of Vote
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/01/texas-primary-election/
Republicans like this. Abortion bans, punishing trans children and their parents.
It IS their bag, baby.Report
Also punishing pregnant woman with medical issues.
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/28/1083536401/texas-abortion-law-6-monthsReport
Corner cases and unintended consequences are a mess.Report
If she hadn’t been able to fly out, she’d have been forced to risk her life and health for the sake of a possibly viable fetus. I think that’s exactly what was intended.Report
There is a difference between “possibly viable fetus” and “has a heartbeat”. That there is a difference is the corner case here.Report
In Anna’s situation, a patient would normally be offered two options: wait and watch for signs of danger, or terminate the pregnancy, which is usually the safest option and most guaranteed to preserve future fertility.
Someone who couldn’t afford a flight would have had to choose ” wait and watch for signs of danger”. Then, if things got life-threatening, she could have gotten the abortion in Texas. And that’s exactly the intent of the law, to make abortion available only in the direst of circumstances.Report
She’s not an edge case, and this is exactly what is intended.Report
You should go back an re-read the link.
She’s in medical nightmare territory where no matter what she does she won’t have a kid at the end. That’s pretty much by definition a corner case.
Now the underlying reasoning of the law is bad (abortion is done for trivial reasoning or is the result of PP wanting income) so the outcomes will also be bad so there’s that.Report
From the perspective of the law she’s not an edge case. The story shows quite plainly that doctors are no longer willing to have open and frank medical conversations with their patients because of the fear of the lawsuits that the law proffered as its enforcement mechanism. Texas is getting exactly what its legislators wanted – a woman denied care by doctors under fiscal threat when seeking an abortion. Her medical status as, essentially, collateral damage, is a sacrifice those legislators were and are willing to make.Report
+1
The anti-abortion movement has always had an activist core that wants to prohibit abortion in every case, regardless of any medical considerations.Report
For a while (in the 80’s?) they were cool with making medical exceptions.
However basic pregnancy damages the health of the mother. Put a “health of the mother” exception in there and you’ve got abortion on demand.
Ergo if you’re serious about preventing abortion, you need to push back pretty far on the health of the mother.Report
And then we inevitably end up where we are now, and Anna’s situation, as described in the article, isn’t an edge case, but a deliberate goal of Texas’ policy.Report
Maybe Abbot et al. should have considered that before inflicting this gratuitous cruelty on one of their citizens, then.Report
I’m old enough to remember when tort reform intended to ward off the baleful effects of frivolous law suits was a key plank of the Republican platform.Report
Time for my favorite story about Governor Abbot!
You’ve noticed the wheelchair, right? Tree branch fell on him and he was paralyzed from the waist down.
He sued basically everyone, and received a settlement. An ongoing settlement. 5000 a month, 4% increase a year. By 2013 he was up to 20k a month. It’s at least a 10 million dollar payout.
So when he got into politics, what was his first major piece of legislation? The one he really pushed? Tort reform, capping payouts — such as the one he got — at 750,000 dollars.
And that tells you all you need to know about Greg Abbot. He thinks HE is worth ten times, minimum, anyone else.Report
As do most white male Republican politicians.Report
Pretty sure that’s not true though. He was a Texas trial judge when that bill passed in 1995. There was a different bill that he supported as governor that capped only medical lawsuits (Abbott didn’t sue doctors).Report
By the way, this “private lawsuit” thing that Texas used for their stealth abortion ban is also going to be the enforcement mechanism for FL’s “Don’t Say Gay” Bill.
I’m sure that if that bill passes, gay teachers getting fired for mentioning their partners, and children with gay parents mentioning there parents being disciplined, will be dismissed by Rightwards as “edge cases and unintended consequences”.Report
This is what I was thinking of in my reference to all the Savvy pundits and respectable intellectuals and reasonable centrists who calmly and politely endorsed eugenics in the 20s and 30s.
But of course, only in the most abstract and refined way, using polite euphemisms and neutral terms.
As if anyone could fail to see where that path led!
When those same sort of people talk about abortion, trans people, CRT and so forth, they always pretend that no one can see exactly what the end game is.Report
This is exactly why I oppose the Left’s socialists, efforts to redefine “rights” as “group rights”, and various bad ideas that make the hearts soar.
The difference of course is we’ve had dozens or maybe hundreds of cases where the socialists cause economic messes while mass genocide in first world nations is pretty seriously rare.Report
ETA: The Texas State Supreme Court has overturned a prior appellate court injunction on what appear to be strictly procedural grounds:
It will be interesting to see how this further plays out, as no self respecting state agency will normally ignore the directives of the Governor or state AG absent court direction to do so.
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/13/1098779201/texas-supreme-court-transgender-gender-affirming-child-abuseReport