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In 2007, a Texas school superintendent rejected any need for sex education classes. Noting that many students in his district live on farms, he said: “They get a pretty good sex education from their animals.”
Guess which state is Number 1 in teen pregnancies? Yes, Texas.
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And who should be the ones to make medical decisions about pregnancies? Not women, their doctors, or their ministers. Rather, the macho Republican autocrats and theocrats who control Texas state government say they are the ones to decide such deeply-personal matters. How embarrassing for these political bullies, then, to have had their repressive, extremist, and dangerous anti-choice legislation derailed by… well, by women.
Some 2,000 of them recently flooded into the Capitol building to support Sen. Wendy Davis, who mounted an 11-hour filibuster against the GOP’s scheme, and this crowd of women shouted down the “leaders” when they tried to rig the rules to silence Davis and ram their bill into law. The women’s outcry startled Gov. Rick “Oops” Perry, who later whimpered that the people’s assertion of citizen’s authority was a “hijacking of the democratic process.” Odd concept: The people “hijacking” democracy.
Odder yet is that these same Republicans once tried to hijack Sen. Davis’ district by gerrymandering most of her minority voters into another district. And now Perry is trying to hijack reality, huffing and puffing that he’ll slap down the women’s opposition to his assault on their rights, because that’s “what the people of this state hired us to do.”
Get a grip, Rick. In a June poll, 74 percent of Texas voters (including six out of 10 Republicans) say such personal medical decisions should be made by women and their doctors, not by political quacks masquerading as Talabanic moral autocrats.