WTF Texas?

[Zen]

So Texas has decided that Faith Based agencies can kids based on their "firmly held religious beliefs? They can place them in "religious education". They can deny LGBTQ couples, single people, or people who practice other religions the right to adopt. (They do have to refer them to another agency that can help them, but what if you live in a rural area and the faith based group is the only one nearby? Sorry, you'll need to drive to Houston to adopt... But that's 100 miles? Tough sh*t... You shouldn't be a *@*#^!)

And your Governor signed this bill into law!

I thought Illinois was screwed up!

[Cazmonster]

As much as I'd love to visit Austin once or meet up with House Jones, I am never going to Texas.

It feels like Texas government is just there to legislate how people can be mean to each other.

[akiva]

How long will it be before a group claims that their religion thinks blacks are inferior, so they shouldn't have to take care of black people?

[Mike]

[Zen]

I truly have NO IDEA how my aunt and her partner of the past fifty years or so have managed to live most of those years in that state! (And the years they weren't in Texas were in Kansas. A hotbed of liberal thinking where religion is science in the schools!)

[Stan]

[Phoebe]

Though the ability to actually hurt the gay children is unimaginably horrid, and the discrimination based on sexual orientation seems worst in the sense that it burdens a group of people who are already targets of frequent discrimination, the willingness to let these groups refuse people who have a different religion than they do shocks me just because you think that would be a far more easily established Constitutional test. So if I'm in a Presbyterian Church that marries gay people and has a number of other generally liberal tendencies, and the Catholics or Lutherans or Baptists who are running the adoption agency aren't thrilled about it, they can refuse my request to adopt a child? I'm not even going to get into Jewish people and Muslims. Will each religious group have to come up with its own adoption agency if it wants to be able to support families? If churches run hospitals, can they decide that they want to discriminate against people who are not of that religion?

I don't see that type of discrimination standing up to court challenges but I guess you never know. People who have these kinds of beliefs shouldn't be anywhere near children. I am not exactly sure what the laws about this are in my own state but I know that similar things were being pushed by the religious crazies. I don't understand why the state, which certainly has a role in regulating adoptions, can permit these sorts of things. Ironically, this degree of bad judgment, and particularly the idea that you could harm children who are themselves gay or lesbian through your psycho religious interventions, is proof positive that you shouldn't be let anywhere near a child, so it's kind of the opposite situation from what these people fantasize it really is.

[Kyle]

My wife asked me about this the other day and I agree with Phoebe- I just don't think this is constitutional.

For my personal beliefs- this is why I don't believe in granting "rights" (in this case, the right to their religious beliefs) to organizations. An organization is a fictional structure created by the laws of the state-- it has no rights.

Also- just wait 20 years when there are more latinos than white folks in Texas. We won't be this way then.

[Kyle]

I was thinking about this over lunch.

You see how the congress and president are doing terrible things that we disagree with? And the outside world looks on with glaring disapproval?

That's what it's been like living in Texas for the past 20 years.

You all live in Texas now.

[Mike]

Living in Texas sucks.

[Kyle]

So here's the thing: it doesn't. I've dealt with this for a long time, and it can be disheartening. Some tips for those of you that are new to living in Texas:

1) Stop telling yourself that things won't always be this conservative. They will. And you're just setting yourself up for depression and frustration later.

2) Understand that we are still becoming more progressive as a whole-- gays can marry! It's not okay to use the n-word!

3) Identify the areas that can be realistically approached with progressivism. For example- are we going to end all racism in the countr... I mean, Texas? No. Can we solve poverty? Nope. But can we at least get people to focus on these things as problems that we acknowledge? Yes. And even though we may not agree on the same solution- let's get a dialogue going to address them.

4) Recognize that it's YOUR shifting ideals that will always make you more progressive than your neighbors. You keep an open mind, right? Which means you change your opinions about things-- for example, you might have though Trans people were weirdos or mentally ill a decade ago, but now you recognize that they have rights and shouldn't be ostracized like that. Thus, even though society is becoming more progressive- SO ARE YOU. So you will always feel like society is out of step.

5) Remember that you're happy. And ultimately that's what matters.

[Mike]

I was being facetious. I live in Nebraska.

The main difference here is that our tiny population means A) we don't make nearly as many headlines and B) we are rarely trendsetters.

[Zen]

Well, despite living in one of those "Blue States", I can actually understand where you're coming from, Kyle. You see, Illinois is "Blue" because of this little town known as "Chicago". For the most part, the rest of the state is so blue it looks like someone stabbed it with a pitchfork and it's bleeding. Some of our LOCAL politicians are progressives. If I lived in Urbana I would have a progressive mayor, or I would have one some of the time. But every time a congressional election comes around, there doesn't seem to be any way to remove the seated Congressmen from his perch. Even when the previous one retired, the race to replace him was somewhere around 60% to 40%. Many of the races have seen around 33% of the vote go to the Democratic candidate. That is, pretty much, the bare minimum you can expect to see any candidate get. There have even been times since I moved here where the candidate was running unopposed until after the primary and somebody just tossed their name in at the last minute. (That was when they got the 33%. The reason they bothered running someone was because there was a Green Party candidate running and they were worried that he would take enough votes that the Green Party would actually gain the right to have primary elections in our district, which they did. The total was actually somewhere along the lines of 60% to 33% to 7% which got the Green party primary elections in the next presidential election. Only lasted one cycle.)

After the district maps were redrawn, there was some hope. They massively gerrymandered the district, putting, basically, downstate urban areas from four metro areas (Champaign-Urbana, Bloomington-Normal, Decatur, and East St. Louis - yes, practically spanning the width of the state) into one district. The voters in the new district had voted 55% to 45% FOR Obama in the previous election.

The Democrats still lost. By quite a bit.

They're pathetic around here...

So, while the state is nominally Blue, I functionally live in a Red state according to the voting practices of my area.

[Phoebe]

[Kyle]

[Phoebe]

I mean the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that these adoption agencies cannot do what they are doing in Texas. So that's a plus.