It is amazing to see the energy, drive and momentum being used to fight and defeat the federal government’s mandate to wear masks.
Why can’t we generate the same energy, drive and momentum to defy the government mandate that prohibits in-class prayer in our public schools?
And how come the non-believers are allowed to go to school and not pray, which is their choice, and believers are not allowed to go to school and pray during class time, which is their choice?
José C. Coronado
Mission
Regressions
under Abbott
Over the last 18 months or so, Gov. Greg Abbott has regressed Texas 100 years or more:
Bounties of $10,000 may now be awarded for contributing to the conviction of anyone aiding or abetting an abortion after six weeks. In that time frame, many or even most women and especially girls might not yet know they are pregnant, much less have thought about whether the pregnancy should be terminated.
The rule could include multiple people, perhaps even the bus driver dropping off someone close to a clinic. No exceptions for rape, which Abbott promises to eliminate (no signs of that happening), or incest, which is an insidious, secret family crime, even more rarely caught or prosecuted. Those babies can just be put up for adoption.
The new restrictions take Texas back to the days of coat hangers, backstreet charlatans and toxic “cleansing” potions implemented for centuries before Roe v. Wade finally made abortion safe and legal in 1973. Maternal mortality is sure to rise.
Gerrymandering and voter suppression laws return Texas to the Jim Crow era before the civil rights reforms of the mid-1960s. See latest mail-in “rejections.”
Banning books harkens back to Hitler’s Germany of the 1930s and ’40s when burning books was almost a civic duty. It is particularly unnerving because some of the books banned impugn precisely that practice in that era of the Holocaust (which too many Americans know too little about).
Deregulation of the power grid that failed so miserably in February 2021 recalls the days before electricity existed and the only way people kept from freezing was by burning wood — though not often their own furniture.
Refusing to expand Medicaid keeps millions of Texans as sick and uninsured as they were before that program existed, again reminiscent of the early 1900s and previous centuries when the poor just died of their ailments and no one much cared. A judge has felt compelled to issue an injunction to a new Abbott directive that parents be investigated for abuse if seeking “gender confirming care” for a transgender child. That mimics the ignorance of millennia. A trial in one case is scheduled for July.
“Permitless carry” now allows untrained and unlicensed gun wielders as young as 18 to wander the state armed — and obviously dangerous. There are some restrictions. But Texans are famous (infamous?) for skirting all kinds of regulations they don’t much like, particularly any involving firearms. The Old West of the 1800s revisited yet again.
Some may yearn for the “good ol’ days.” Until someone near and dear is confronted with any of these perhaps fatal issues. Then how ’bout the “walk in those moccasins”? Why does anyone want this man — or his pals in power — reelected?
V.L. Bunderson
Brownsville
