“THE PHANTOM MENACE”, the Star Wars film made in 1999, would be an apt title for a documentary exploring a 21st-century phenomenon in a galaxy far closer: the legislature of the State of Texas. In recent years, Texas passed a voter-ID law that would have disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of its residents. It also approved abortion-provider regulations that would have reduced the number of clinics in the state to the single digits. Texas’s purported justifications for these laws—averting voter fraud and protecting women’s health—were roundly shot down by, respectively, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court. In both cases, the menace Texas feared was found to be a figment of legislators’ creative imaginations. The real motives behind the laws were transparent: Texas wanted fewer Democratic-leaning blacks, students and poor people to vote, and it wanted to make abortion rights harder to exercise.
Texas has struck again. With the stated aim of protecting the “privacy” and “safety” of its citizens, Texas Republicans are pushing a new bill requiring bathrooms in schools and government buildings to be reserved for people whose...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2ixhiCP
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