Orwell’s Texas

“We’re from Texas, what country you from”?

For years there was a TV ad for Ford’s F150 truck which featured a rough, tough-looking cowboy asking that uniquely Texas question.

The ad ran only in Texas…but here’s what kind of ‘country’ Texas is…
One which does little or nothing for its residents (“ You’re welcome in Texas but you’re on your own”); one which limits voting rights and opportunities; which doesn’t wear masks or mandate vaccines in a pandemic no matter how many people and children get sick and die; one which says they can put teacher graduates of their beloved University of Texas to work in every community but never tells you about the number of teachers who quit before five years are up; one which totally depends upon the influx of Mexican labor to work the farms, cut the grass and trim the trees as gardeners, do the overall dirty work left for immigrant labor and doesn’t do a thing to help them and hates that in Texas whites will soon be in a minority.

And oh yes, one which has banned abortions after six weeks when most women don’t even realize they are pregnant and does it in such an outrageous way that they get a quiet nod of OK from five Justices on the Supreme Court.

Another country indeed.

Despite its location on the map of the United States, Texas is not “Southwest”…it is purely Southern. It’s attitudes, the warmth and outward friendliness (“How y’all”) mask a deep-seated inbred life. Its colleges are full of Texans…Baylor University likes to think it is the Southern Baptist Notre Dame despite the vast superiority of Notre Dame’s SAT scores. Few people leave Texas to seek careers in other States. It is difficult to find people from other States leading Texas corporations. It’s as if Texans feel their World begins and ends in Texas. We know of no other place quite like it.

ABORTION

And it was in the years living and working in Texas that we saw without genuine understanding what the objection to abortion really meant to so many millions of Americans – especially in Southern States. Fighting abortion all these years since Roe v. Wade in 1973… all the while never letting up on the endless insistence that abortion be banned.

The most obvious reasoning was loosely based on the quasi-religious idea of the sanctity of life within the Right to Life movement all across the country.

Having been close to a Southern Baptist Minister for 52 years, we heard the evangelical argument against abortion constantly along with chapter, verse and scripture.

His arguments sounded very similar to the political dominance of the Catholic Church in the Northeast and Midwest.

But as the years past and the makeup of the US Supreme Court essentially stayed the same, Roe v Wade held up. New members of the Court appointed by Republican Presidents seemed to honor the 1973 decision and while there were efforts across the South to use the authority of the State to limit opportunities for abortion, the Supreme Court decision remained intact and dominant.

And then came the changes on the Court during the Trump Administration with his pledge to appoint Justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. And while these nominees focused on their desire to respect the Court’s ruling, it was obvious to many that eventually they would find legal pathways to end that decision’s power to maintain a pro-abortion stance that has lasted for almost 50 years.

And now Texas has shown them the way with a new State law that avoids State involvement in the issue but instead gives every citizen in Texas the right to report anyone wanting an abortion, providing the abortion or assisting in even the transportation of someone seeking an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.

Any citizen involved in that attempted abortion can be fined $10,000.

The Supreme Court immediately heard opposition to this law on a special docket hearing and in a 5 to 4 vote allowed the law to stand because it violated no constitutional law.

The Attorney-General of the United States, Merrick Garland, has filed suit against Texas claiming just the opposite…that their new law has violated the constitution.

And so once again pro and anti-abortion forces meet in the courtroom.

The Supreme Court will meet in October to hear opposition to a Mississippi law which limits abortion to 13 weeks and outlaws anything beyond that time limit…a direct attempt to overthrow Roe v. Wade’s 22 week limit.

But what is this fight really all about?

Is it based on religious feelings or something else?

ABORTION AND RACISM

While it may be an authentic feeling that the quality of life must be preserved, we feel that something deeper is involved in the endless abortion debate.

And we return to our years in Texas to look deeper.

While in Waco, we had the opportunity to closely examine the lives of Black and Brown residents in that city, the county surrounding it and the entire State.

We saw the reality that Black residents led very separate lives…almost removed from their surroundings but that Mexican-Americans were very much involved in the lives of everyone.

We also saw this: that pregnancies among teen Mexican-American girls without husbands seemed to bother none of their families. We saw pregnant teenagers at sports activities sitting with Moms and Dads with no shame.

We had a long interview with a 70 plus Black Great Grandmother who railed against her daughter and granddaughters for continuing to have children without Fathers…whom she had to care for night and day as their Mothers were out and about.

And years later when Donald Trump announced his campaign for the Presidency, we heard his accusation against Mexican rapists and druggies, and knew that he saw what we had seen years before: the attitude that Brown and Black people did not seek abortions and multiplied, while white women did and received them.

And he realized that he could awaken those white nationalists and supremacists throughout the South to the fact that they would be overwhelmed in time by a population increasingly brown and black.

Are we suggesting that the deep-seated multi-year effort to ban abortions is essentially about racism? Yes we are.

And the State of Texas had adopted an approach which makes the average citizen a vigilante…able to secretly report any knowledge of someone’s desire for an abortion and all the people who might be helping that woman to obtain one.

Turning average citizens into undercover agents reporting on neighbors is an Orwellian prediction of the future…a future which has now clearly arrived and will flourish if Texas gets its way.

We know where the Supreme Court now sits on the issue of abortion.

We know that two-thirds of Americans believe that a woman has the right to choose about what happens within her body.

In a deeply divided America, we do not know whether the Court or the people will prevail.