Forgive me if you’ve seen this one before, but I don’t recall it being mentioned around here. Apparently, in addition to making abortions illegal after six weeks it will also be illegal to help someone obtain an abortion after that time period.

As regular readers know (and have told me repeatedly) I have hit the religion very hard the last couple of days. So, I’m looking at this from another angle. One of the things they taught us in political science and history was the notion that over the course of a generation the political parties will often switch positions almost entirely.

It’s one of the hallmarks of conservatism to argue that they were the party for civil rights. In a sense it’s true if you are strictly looking at labels, but the thought behind the label is what matters. Conservatives have been against civil rights from the very beginning. In the beginning, they just called themselves Democrats.

Classical conservatives believe in keeping the government out of our bedrooms, personal lives, and life choices. The Republican party abandoned that a long time ago. Instead they want to stay out of your pocketbook but govern your body. It’s just a little ironic that the best argument against conservatives on this issue comes from themselves. At least it comes from what they used to believe.

Of course, Texans aren’t the only ones passing questionable laws. It seems Tennessee is trying to limit access to all vaccines for children. Somehow, the mental gymnastics needed to consider these laws is staggering. They are still overly concerned about bathrooms it seems.

This is all very simple to me. You believe in freedom or you don’t. You regulate activities where other people can get hurt and you allow those other activities to slide. When you are more concerned about where someone goes to the bathroom than what they could possibly do with a gun there is something seriously wrong. When conservative values go out the window then what values do conservatives have left?

Those of you that have been reading these regularly have probably deciphered a pattern. I tend to hover around the same topics like a moth rushing to the flame. That means I hover between issues of faith, education, and issue framing. While I appreciate that not everyone wants to hear about faith, that issue is paramount to me in terms of reaching a bigger audience.

The simplest way to consider this is to consider it as a form of language. It’s more like a regional dialect. It’s like those raging debates about how “coke” is labeled in speech or how someone says “y’all.” In this case, it isn’t regional but spiritual (or not spiritual).

People speak in a particular way when they come from a Christian tradition. They speak in a certain way when they don’t. They also speak in a specific way when they used to be Christian and have decided to go in a different direction they speak in a specific way. A large part of keeping a big tent in politics is finding ways to communicate to a variety of groups. Those groups all have languages of their own.

The Democratic party has slowly developed an advantage over time of communicating with people of color. They have developed an advantage of communicating with women. They have developed an advantage of communicating with the LGTBQ+ community. They have developed an advantage in communicating with those that have shunned the church.

That leaves one group out. Those are the people that the party is having an increasingly difficult time reaching. Those are the people that many progressives are becoming increasingly hostile towards. These are the folks that share political values even when they are still members of the flock. They can be reached if you simply speak the language.

This concept is easy to understand when we look at the other side. Think of how many times we have watched a conservative think they are trying to reach disaffected groups of their own only to come off sounding more offensive. They belittle women. They somehow harbor racists and spew racist language even when they seem to be trying to be inclusive. It’s awe inspiring in a way.

It is all well and good not to be interested in the church itself, but it is paramount to understand the politics going on inside it. There is a divide throughout Christianity between what we might classify as the legalistic group of Christians and those that we might classify as the social justice group of Christians.

The Bible obviously can be split into various parts, but the two biggest dichotomies exist between all of the rules and regulations that people of faith are supposed to follow and the mission of Christ. That mission involves feeding the poor, clothing the naked, and healing the sick. That is the very heart of the progressive platform.

The problem comes when you insult believers. I understand it. Many believers are insulting themselves. They don’t respect non-believers and deride them unmercifully. We all get that. Yet, there are a group of good and decent believers that believe in our values that are there to be courted. I know because I’m one of them.

The current strategy forces those that we might label “the Christian left” to choose between Christian and left. When you force people to choose you never end up liking their choice. When you are forced to choose you usually choose against those forcing you to make the choice. Stop making them choose.

Since Dems went to DC to air their grievance over voter suppression laws, Texas Trump Republicans are twisting themselves into knots trying to vilify them.  There’s talk from everyone from Abbott down to Brisco Big Hat Cain talking about vacations, fundraising, “cushy private jets”, so on and so forth, but the one that takes the cake is Trump Republican strategist Corbin Casteel, who said, “[The Democrats are] walking out the door right when they have an opportunity to get their staff paid when they’ve been complaining about it.  It’s a double-edged sword. They may be able to hold off on the voter integrity bill but they’re also screwing their own staff.”  Casteel is referring to the legislative staff, who’s paychecks stop on August 31 due to Abbott’s pocket veto of funding as retaliation for not getting his top priority bill passed in regular session.  That priority to fix the power grid, you ask?  No, silly, the voter suppression bill that makes it harder to vote in that state that is already the hardest in the nation to vote.

So, Abbott and the GQP are resorting to the same mob tactics as Trump – break something and then threaten the victims who don’t cave in to their demands.  Abbott could fix the problem he created with the stroke of a pen, and pressure will mount on him because he’s punishing Republican staffers with the same mob tactic.  We all know, including the Republicans pushing The Big Lie, that the whole “election integrity” issue is bullshit.  This entire issue is a desperate effort to cling to power.

So let’s be clear who the villains are – Abbott and his enablers in the statehouse, who are taking unprecedented actions to pander to their Trump base and keep people from voting.  It’s anti-democratic, unAmerican, and most certainly unTexan.  They must be stopped, and that will only happen at the federal level.

As was widely reported this morning, Texas Democrats have decided to take their big blue butts to Washington, D.C. today. This will deny Texas Republicans the quorum they need to pass restrictive voting legislation that they were unable to pass in the regular legislative session, earlier this year. Whether they can be arrested outside of the state is unclear, but the House rules about the arrests are as follows:

“All absentees for whom no sufficient excuse is made may, by order of a majority of those present, be sent for and arrested, wherever they may be found, by the sergeant-at-arms or an officer appointed by the sergeant-at-arms for that purpose, and their attendance shall be secured and retained. The house shall determine on what conditions they shall be discharged.”

It’s a ballsy move by the Democrats and I am glad they are doing it. In terms of whether their reason is “sufficient” or not, the sergeant-at-arms will have to travel quite a long way to find them. They’ll have to stay gone for a while, as Abbott can continue to call a special session at least through the end of the summer.

Now, if the special session addressed the power grid or some other substantive legislation instead of Abbott’s campaign materials, I’d feel differently. This entire special session is a waste of the state’s time and money. There’s no reason to restrict the distribution of mail-in ballots. My granddaddy’s been voting by mail since he retired from the postal service in 1986 and he always gets an application mailed to him.

During the pandemic, my shero and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo successfully implemented drive-thru voting and 24 hour voting. Hidalgo allowed both Democrats and Republicans to vote using both of these options so I don’t know what the Republicans are so pissy about. Instead of trying to block Democratic counties to vote, they should be working on turning out their own voters. Instead, they call a special session to try and eliminate any voting technology or innovation faster than you can say “Varmint.”

Of course, for the last twenty years, the Republicans have made their tent so small that Greg Abbott might be seen as too liberal to govern in the upcoming gubernatorial primary, so it seems that winning more voters isn’t going to happen. All they’ve got left is meanness and trickery. If we don’t vote these schmucks out we get the legislature we deserve.

It started innocently enough. My daughter was attending a retreat at the church. As a part of the retreat the participants were encouraged to attend reconciliation. Before you attend confession you go through an examination of conscience. That’s a rabbit hole by itself.

She got hung up on several things that alarmed her and I can definitely see why. One of them alarmed me. The examination of conscience said that voting for pro abortion candidates was a sin. So, in other words, voting for Democrats is a sin. Where can I even get started on that?

Okay, I know where. There is no such position politically. I’ve never heard of any politician being pro-abortion. I’ve never met a single person that would classify themselves as pro-abortion. I can’t say the viewpoint doesn’t exist because it is impossible to prove a negative. However, I can assert that the Catholic Church is distorting the truth in a document about truth. The irony is palpable.

The truth is that some people are pro-choice and some people are anti-choice. Anti-choice is a negative term, so we can use the pro-life substitute. The point is that they believe in the sanctity of life. That is not a wrong viewpoint. However, the pro-choice viewpoint is not the 180 degree opposite. It is a belief in privacy and the rights of self-determination over each individual’s body. Most pro-choice people are privately against abortion in most circumstances, but simply leave it to the individual to decide.

That might seem like splitting hairs, but the truth is far different and one of the reasons why the distortion is so hurtful. Truth is a four letter word, but one of the things that pro-choice politicians do is seek other ways to lower abortion numbers. If we follow the facts then we would see that abortion rates have been lower under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents.

Admittedly, one cannot directly attribute any of that to a single policy or decision. It is impossible to definitively say that Democratic policies had anything to do with it. However, it should be telling that when you go back to the Reagan administration you see rates remaining level while they went down under every Democratic president.

There is a difference between posturing and actually doing something. The best way to limit the number of abortions is to limit the demand for abortions. You do that with contraception. You do that with sex education. You do that by financially assisting young families to take off the financial pressure. The church even had a program called “The Gabriel Project” that did this very thing.

However, all of this is just a cursory irritation. The real problem is calling voting for a person a sin. Voting is a choice. It’s a decision that calls for hard choices for anyone that’s a committed Catholic or Christian. Sure, it is hard reconciling our church’s teaching on abortion with a pro-choice position. It should be hard reconciling the church’s stance on life in general with a party pushing the death penalty, wars of choice, and are more supportive of police departments that kill so many unarmed suspects. Wouldn’t that also be a sin?

Wouldn’t it be a sin to support candidates that call for treating refugees as less than human? Wouldn’t it be a sin to support a candidate that places children in cages? Wouldn’t it be a sin to support a candidate that so cavalierly handled a pandemic that over 600,000 Americans died on his watch? We can play this tit for tat game forever as I’m sure Republicans reading this can rattle off a similar list of sins.

The overwhelming point here is that if voting for any particular candidate is a sin then voting for any candidate is a sin. They all commit sins. We all commit sins. We either weigh which sins we can live with or we turn that part of our brain off and pull the lever. Either way, I’m not taking responsibility for what a politician does. Either way I vote they will do something objectionable. I choose to vote for the candidates with the least objectionable positions. That’s what responsible citizens do.

Let’s hear it for Utah.

A 19-year-old woman was charged Friday with a hate crime accusing her of stomping on a pro-police sign and throwing it in the trash — all in front of an officer who had just given her friend a speeding ticket.

And in Utah, Honey, that’s a hate crime.  And the officer filed charges against a 19 year old girl and swore on a stack of Bibles that  …

“I observed one of the friends … stomping on a ‘Back the Blue’ sign next to where the traffic stop was conducted, crumple it up in a destructive manner and throw it into a trash can all while smirking in an intimidating manner towards me,” the deputy wrote in the affidavit.

She smirked. He felt intimidated. Okay, so who’s the snowflake now, Wilbur?

I gotta tell ya this – if it had been a Black Lives Matter sign, they would have given her a medal, an AK47, a cute camo hat, and a free license to hunt liberals.

I guess I need to study Utah law to find out if rolling your eyes is considered a terrorist threat.  If so, I’d have to go there with a bag over my head.