Texas Is Leading the Way Stripping Our Rights
The past several weeks have served as a stark reminder that the rights we enjoy as citizens are not nearly so inviolable as many of us believed. Beyond the egregious violations of sovereignty, self-determination, and the right to live in peace currently playing out in Putin’s violent invasion of Ukraine, we have witnessed multiple attacks on our own rights domestically. Both voting rights and reproductive rights recently suffered serious blows. At the beginning of March, Texas held it’s primary elections, the first after new voting laws had been implemented by the Republican controlled state legislature. Sweeping reforms, from new voter ID requirements to banning drive-through voting and 24-hour voting sites, seemed intended to make voting more difficult in practice. If so, the reforms worked as intended, driving down voting participation, and causing widespread confusion. When the dust had settled, mail-in ballots had been rejected for over 18,000, or nearly 15% of voters in the most populous counties in Texas! Counties with a higher percentage of African American and Latino residents. During the 2020 elections, before these laws were put in place, only 1% of ballots were rejected. Americans have remained clear that most believe in the right to vote in free and fair elections. It seems, however, that without active intervention our democracy will slip away, with 18 other states having passed similar legislation to Texas. Democrats, for all their histrionics, have generally failed to take any meaningful action to safe-guard our elections, even to save their own power. Texas hasn’t just been trailblazing ways to disenfranchise voters, the state’s Republican lawmakers have been busy designing innovate legal chicanery to strip away women’s reproductive rights as well. With the Texas Supreme Court rejecting the final challenge to its abortion bounty hunting law, after SCOTUS punted the question, the flood gates have opened for copycat laws in other states. The Republican zealotry doesn’t stop with abortion, however, as demonstrated by Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) in her questioning of SCOTUS nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Monday of her support for Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). These kinds of views are wildly out of step with the majority of Americans’ beliefs, despite the loud protestations of Christian theocrats. The rights that multiple generations of Americans have cherished, are being stripped from us as we speak. As usual, there will be no one coming to save us and our tattered democracy, the political parties are either in opposition to our cause, or impotent to stop it. The safeguarding of the rights so many have struggled for in the past, and the extension of a new bill of rights tomorrow, can only be achieved through mass organization and struggle. It will take not just political, but economic power, to achieve a society that values the voices, and respects the rights and autonomy of all it’s citizens. So join us each Tuesday as we build a growing movement in solidarity for all our rights! #DSOT #UPM
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