Month: January 2023

Catholic Hospital Broke Law by Denying Transgender Patient Surgery: Judge

https://www.newsweek.com/catholic-hospital-broke-law-denying-transgender-patient-surgery-judge-1772458?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR3Vi6WS-8dfWShhckF_jLvFC0kNPhUgnr0giS5ZJsh2NcKe7w0pPzezsUQ#Echobox=1673302438

Religious views should not and must not take priority over human rights or medical care.   This must be stopped in the US as more states face the fact that all the hospitals are owned by the Catholic church and the church requires them to let people die rather than provide accepted needed medical care that goes against religious dogma.    Hugs

NEWS

Catholic Hospital Broke Law by Denying Transgender Patient Surgery: Judge

BY 

A Catholic hospital discriminated against a transgender patient by refusing to provide him a hysterectomy, a federal judge ruled.

Jesse Hammons, a transgender man, sued the University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center, after he was denied the surgery, a gender-affirming procedure performed on many transgender men, in 2019, alleging that the hospital discriminated against him because of his gender identity.

St. Joseph Medical Center, a religious entity purchased by the University of Maryland Medical Center in 2012, argued that its doctors would not perform the surgery because doing so contradicts their religious beliefs.

The Friday ruling came as the LGBTQ community continues advocating for stronger legal protections against discrimination. Conservatives, on the other hand, have argued that strengthened anti-discrimination protections would violate their freedom of speech.

Judge rules hospital discriminated trangender patient

A person holds a transgender pride flag. On Friday, a federal judge ruled that a Catholic hospital violated anti-discrimination laws by denying a transgender men gender-affirming surgery, citing religious beliefs.CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY IMAGES; DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

U.S. District Court Judge Deborah K. Chasanow ruled that the refusal by the hospital—which is part of the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS)—to perform the hysterectomy violated Maryland’s anti-discrimination laws and that UMMS is bound by Maryland law to “operate the medical system without discrimination based upon race, creed, sex, or national origin.”

Chasanow ruled that the hospital, which receives Medicare and Medicaid funding, violated Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits providers who receive public funding from discriminating “on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, disability, or sex,” including gender identity.

In 2019, Hammons was set to receive the surgery as part of his gender-affirming plan, but the hospital canceled it only one week prior, citing religious reasons, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Hammons, in a statement released by the ACLU, which represented him in court, described the ruling as a “great win for myself and all transgender people denied equal treatment because of who they are.”

“All I wanted was for UMMS to treat my health care like anyone else’s, and I’m glad the court recognized how unfair it was to turn me away,” Hammons said. “I’m hopeful UMMS can change this harmful policy and help more transgender people access the care they need.”

In a statement forwarded to Newsweek on Monday, a UMMS spokesperson wrote that the medical system disputes “many of the conclusions that were reached in this decision and may be in a position to comment further after additional analysis of the ruling.”

“Legal disagreements aside, we sincerely wish the very best for Mr. Hammons and we support his efforts to seek the highest quality healthcare,” the statement reads. “We may disagree on certain technical, legal points but compassion for the patients we serve remains foundational to our work.”

And on to other interesting stuff

Image
#Health Care is a Human Right
———————————————————————
Image

Both parties are not the same.

——————————————————————————————–
Image
Gov. Greg Abbott said Texas ‘desperately needs more money’ to address the border after spending millions on busing migrants to other parts o
During Biden’s trip to the border, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott renewed calls for the federal government to send aid to address illegal immigratio
BUSINESS INSIDER|KELSEY VLAMIS
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said Sunday during President Joe Biden’s visit to the border that the state “desperately needs more money” to address the issue.
After meeting with Biden, Abbott took questions from reporters, with one asking if he planned to ask the federal government to send Texas additional funds to help address the historic surge in illegal immigration.
“One hundred percent. Texas desperately needs more money,” Abbott said. “I know the Republicans in the US House have committed to providing Texas the money that we need. We just finished over the past two years spending 4 billion of Texas taxpayer dollars for Texas to fill the gap caused by the Biden administration.”
Here’s the video Governor Abbott: Texas desperately needs more money pic.twitter.com/s1UropQEFb — Acyn (@Acyn) January 8, 2023
ALT
View on Twitter
 
Abbott has previously called on the federal government to reimburse the state for its border efforts and to send additional resources including the National Guard. From October 2020 to October 2021, the US Border Patrol encountered 1.7 million migrants attempting to cross the US-Mexico border illegally, the highest number in more than 70 years.
In April, Abbott began chartering buses to drop off migrants in other parts of the country, like Washington, DC, and Chicago, without giving those cities any notice — a program that Texas has spent millions of dollars on.
Texas had spent $12 million on the efforts as of August, the Texas Tribune reported at the time. By November, the amount spent busing migrants out of state had risen to $20 million, according to the local outlet WFAA.
Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Avatar
justinspoliticalcorner
Follow
 
Image
DeSantis appoints anti-civil rights activist Chris Rufo to New College of Florida Board of Trustees
WWW.MEDIAMATTERS.ORG

John Knefel at MMFA: 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has appointed right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who rose to national prominence demonizing racial justice advocates and attacking LGBTQ communities, to the board of trustees of the New College of Florida. The appointment is all the more noteworthy given that Rufo lives in Gig Harbor, Washington.
Rufo is a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and has spent years attempting to inject bigotry and incorrect information into mainstream discourses about gay and trans people, drag queens, and the academic discipline known as critical race theory. Rufo is also a frequent guest on Fox News, including on Tucker Carlson’s prime-time show.
“My ambition is to help the new board majority transform New College into a classical liberal arts institution,” Rufo tweeted in response to the news. “We are recapturing higher education.”
Rufo has long wanted to exert conservative control over educational policy, calling teachers “political predators” under a pretext of curriculum transparency. Now, with a new formal appointment, he’s positioned to threaten the safety and well-being of Black and LGBTQ students at New College of Florida, a public liberal arts school with a reportedly significant gay and trans population.
“A lot of the students there are trans and even more are queer,” Parkland shooting survivor and gun control activist X González recently wrote in The Cut. González added that “In the queer space of New College, changing your pronouns, name, or presentation is a nonevent.”
Rufo has repeatedly voiced his opposition to respecting trans and nonbinary people’s pronouns, further evidence that his presence could very well endanger the school’s supportive environment. If that’s DeSantis’ goal, it would be fully in line with the governor’s other anti-LGBTQ policies, and his broader strategy of harming vulnerable populations to create a spectacle to further his own political ambitions.
Rufo has repeatedly voiced his opposition to respecting trans and nonbinary people’s pronouns, further evidence that his presence could very well endanger the school’s supportive environment.“
Rufo largely owes his standing in conservative media to his successful attacks on critical race theory, or CRT. As nationwide protests erupted in the summer of 2020 following the police murder of George Floyd in a Minneapolis suburb, Rufo began writing about Black Lives Matter with the goal of discrediting the movement. That September, he appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to press then-President Donald Trump to prohibit any federal training programs geared toward racial sensitivity awareness, and he took credit when Trump followed his advice. Days later, Carlson launched his own attacks against CRT, praising Rufo in the process. Fox News completely embraced the anti-CRT panic, and by the end of 2021, had hosted Rufo at least 52 times and mentioned CRT nearly 4,000 times that year.
Rufo has admitted that he doesn’t know anything about what CRT actually is and isn’t interested in learning about it. His openly stated goal is to brand the term as “toxic,” thereby rendering attempts to redress racial oppression through education as difficult as possible. Already, professors in Florida are avoiding including CRT ideas in their curricula for fear of violating a law DeSantis signed in April 2022 that essentially prohibits teaching students about structural racism.
Early last year, Rufo redirected his focus onto LGBTQ communities, joining in the chorus of right-wing activists who adopted the slur “groomer” to refer to gay and trans people. In March, he claimed that Disney was sexualizing children, part of his campaign to support DeSantis’ so-called “Don’t Say Gay” legislation. Those attacks were further amplified by the anti-LGBTQ account Libs of TikTok, which led to harassment of teachers and parents who supported gay and trans students. These bigoted attacks exploded on Facebook and other online platforms.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (D) appoints far-right anti-LGBTQ+ zealot and faux moral panic peddler Christopher Rufo to the New College Of Florida’s Board of Trustees as part of the college’s hard-right shift. 

Rufo initially was infamous for bringing the faux moral panic of “CRT” in K-12 schools and workplaces into the discussion.

 

The huge reason gay people are being called “groomers” and being harassed at drag brunch by zealots? This guy.

Source: mediamatters.org
 
————————————————————————–
 
 
https://reagan-was-a-horrible-president.tumblr.com/post/706095302836355072
https://reagan-was-a-horrible-president.tumblr.com/post/706022643912130560
https://reagan-was-a-horrible-president.tumblr.com/post/706022262994878464
https://reagan-was-a-horrible-president.tumblr.com/post/706022027138646016/queeranarchism-magicalpaz-prismatic-bell
https://reagan-was-a-horrible-president.tumblr.com/post/706021642303864832
https://reagan-was-a-horrible-president.tumblr.com/post/706019751190724608
https://cthulhulovesewe.tumblr.com/post/706090241268826112

These came from liberalsarecool.com and there is a lot more there every day.

image

image

image

image

image

image

image

image

image

image

image

image

image

image

image

image

image

image

image

THE MOST INSANE HOMOPHOBIC TIKTOKS YET… | NOAHFINNCE

THIS IS HONESTLY THE MOST INSANE ONE YET.. THE HOMOPHOBIC TIKTOKS.. AND THE DEMONS.. AND THE BIBLE? IT’S SO CONFUSING OH MY GOD

Anti-LGBTQ+ parents now want ‘deprogrammers’ to turn their estranged kids conservative

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/01/anti-lgbtq-parents-now-want-deprogrammers-turn-estranged-kids-conservative/

Again they want the gay and trans people erased from society.   They don’t want people to be themselves, they want everyone including their kids to be clones of them.   These people don’t want freedom for others, they want the freedom to force you to have their views on everything.   They are conservatives so say right wingers who feel it is OK to be rude and insulting but don’t like the fact that their children don’t think that is OK.  In the article it says the parents don’t have an issue that their kids came out as gay which is a weird way to word saying that their kids are gay, but I don’t think they respected their children or their own ideas.   I have delt with this before, such as when a family member refused to stop using the “N” word slur when talking about black people.  The only thing you can do is refuse to be around them to get the point across.   Being progressive and accepting the modern society is a cult to these people.   She says the daughter made a big deal over a coffee cup, but in fact the mother is the one who refused a cup due to the rainbow flag on it.  So the real issue is the parents are bigots whose kids don’t want to be around bigots and the parents want to force their kids to become bigots like the parents are.  I had to laugh at the way K. Yang talks about a global conspiracy to … make things better and less oppressive for everyone which the right / conservatives cannot tolerate.   Hugs

“I never even considered trying to find a deprogrammer,” one mother said. “But I think it’s too late for me and my kids.”
 
By  
A lonely older lady
Photo: Shutterstock

A new trend seems to be all the rage for anti-LGBTQ+ parents, who have been increasingly touting the need to “deprogram” their progressive children and turn them conservative.

A recent report from the New York Post features a group of mothers who say their children refuse to talk to them after being “indoctrinated” with “gender and race ideology” by progressive high schools and colleges.

The article likens progressive values to being in a cult and details the mothers’ desire to find a “deprogrammer” to jolt their children back to reality.

The mothers were inspired by another story from the New York Post, that of Annabella Rockwell, a pharmaceutical fortune heiress, a rightwing activist, and a Mount Holyoke alumna who claimed that her mother hired a $300/day “deprogrammer” to turn her conservative after college.

“I saw Annabella’s story and my life turned upside down,” said 54-year-old Beth Pensky, whose son and daughter don’t speak to her.

“I realized I wasn’t alone and I saw what happened to her was similar to what I think happened to my kids. I never even considered trying to find a deprogrammer. I didn’t know they existed. But I think it’s too late for me and my kids. They won’t even talk to me.”

A mother named Dorothy, whose last name was not given, also connected to Rockwell.

“Reading about Annabella was the first time I connected the dots to everything that had happened with my daughter,” she said.

“She had what she called ‘an awakening’ and became very angry at me and her father. It was a big personality change. We are conservatives so [our political views] became a huge problem. We were not allowed to visit her on campus. She went on a mission to convert her brother against us. She told him that he should be against us because we’re conservatives and that we all should be against men.”

Pensky and Dorothy also both claimed they did not have any problem with the fact that they each had daughters come out as gay. Rather, they say it was the way their daughters treated them in the aftermath that was the problem.

The article also featured an anonymous mother of five daughters who she claimed were turned against her by the upscale New York City private school Dalton and then further lured into the cult of progressivism in college.

“The emotional stress is unbelievable,” she said. “I consider myself a Democrat and a liberal but it doesn’t matter. I’ve had fights with some of my girls just because I wouldn’t get myself a Rainbow pride Starbucks cup. The cup itself became this huge battleground. Apparently it matters what cup you hold.”

And the deprogramming business is apparently booming.

36-year-old K. Yang was once a trans and gay rights activist who used they/them pronouns but has since “deprogrammed” herself. She said she is extremely busy these days as a full-time deprogrammer

Yang’s website claims to be “exposing the trans agenda.”

“There’s a war for our bodies & minds and it’s all connected,” it says.

Yang touts the ideology of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs), claiming that advancing trans rights somehow contributes to a lessening of rights for cisgender women.

“A lot of these parents are completely bewildered,” Yang told the Post. “A lot of them noticed a marked difference in their children’s behavior. Then all of a sudden ‘she’ identifies as ‘he.’ A lot of this is like a cult except parents don’t realize their child is being indoctrinated — not from an old-fashioned cult that takes you away somewhere but through schools and their devices. This is happening to kids everywhere, even those with a robust family life.”

Yang claimed there is a global conspiracy to “restructure society” that goes all the way up the United Nations.

“They are undermining the sexually dimorphic nature of reality and breaking down the differences between the sexes to break down our identity. They are constructing identities for us and they want us to adopt them.”

The article even featured the so-called “father of deprogramming,” 92-year-old Ted Patrick who was known in the 1970s and 1980s for helping parents “deprogram” their kids who had fallen victim to cults. Patrick’s controversial practices led to multiple jail sentences and dozens of indictments on grounds like kidnapping and conspiracy.

Patrick claims young people today are in a state of emergency and essentially says they should be kidnapped to fix it.

“It’s worse now than it was then,” Patrick said. “But parents are more scared and weak than they were then. You’ve got to get these kids alone. I’ve snatched people from Yale. I deal with the mind. You have to go into the mind, into that container, and bring the real person out. Once you get the person out you have to get the person thinking again — thinking like a critical thinker.”

 
 

Students say Florida school play shut down over Don’t Say Gay

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/01/students-say-florida-school-play-shut-dont-say-gay/

The show was about how detrimental censorship is. “I don’t need to point out the irony,” said one student.
 
By  
Students say Florida school play shut down over Don’t Say Gay
Photo: Screenshot Madeline Scotti Instagram

Students at a high school in Florida are pointing to the state’s Parental Rights in Education law, aka Don’t Say Gay, as the reason for the sudden cancellation of a long-scheduled drama department production.

The canceled play, Indecent by Paula Vogel, depicts the true story of another stage play called God of Vengeance, which was shut down in New York in 1923 on charges on indecency; the Broadway production of the Yiddish play depicted the first-ever onstage kiss between a lesbian couple in American theater.

The production at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in Jacksonville was scheduled last May and cast in December. Indecent was to premiere March 1, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the ill-fated Broadway show.

Senior cast member Madeline Scotti, 17, shared news of the cancellation in an emotional Instagram video on Thursday night.

“Indecent is a story about how detrimental censorship is, about how its damaging effects can ruin a nation and a community. I don’t need to point out the irony,” Scotti said.

An email from Douglas Anderson principal Tina Wilson the same evening informed parents that Anton Chekov’s The Seagull would replace Vogel’s play. “A closer review of the mature content” of Indecent led school officials “to the conclusion that Seagull is better suited for a school production,” Wilson wrote.

In her Instagram video, Scotti claims school administrators all but acknowledged the show was axed due to the Don’t Say Gay law, which prohibits discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in grades K through 3 and restricts them in higher grade levels.

“Tonight during rehearsal our company was notified that the school board is shutting us down not because of, but related to the ideals stated in the Don’t Say Gay bill,” said Scotti. “They are trying to tell us this play is dirty, immoral, obscene, and, of course, indecent. And by that nature, they’re trying to tell me that I myself and my community is dirty, immoral, obscene, and indecent.”

A spokesperson for Duval County Public Schools denied any connection to the controversial new law, enacted in September.

“Indecent contains adult sexual dialog that is inappropriate for student cast members and student audiences,” Tracy Pierce told Teen Vogue. “It’s that simple. The decision has no relevance to any legislation but is rather a function of our responsibilities to ensure students engage in educational activities appropriate for their age.”

Drama productions at Douglas Anderson preceding the Parental Rights in Education law include Rent, depicting multiple LGBTQ+ relationships and the devastation wrought by the AIDS epidemic, and Chicago, a musical featuring singing prostitutes.

NPR: Why Jair Bolsonaro left Brazil for Florida (and what Biden can do about it)

Why Jair Bolsonaro left Brazil for Florida (and what Biden can do about it)
Brazil’s far-right ex-president was laying low in Orlando, Fla., as a mob of his supporters stormed government buildings this weekend. Analysts say the move insulates him from possible legal jeopardy.

Read in NPR: https://apple.news/AQeZp2RqpSyy1Ujf2c9m5eA

Shared from Apple News

Sent from my iPad

Let’s talk about Republican priorities and ethics….

Report: 188 Catholic clergy members in Kansas are alleged predators

https://onlysky.media/hemant-mehta/report-188-catholic-clergy-members-in-kansas-are-alleged-predators/

Damn, Damn, Damn!   Joe My God had two of these today.   All religious leaders but not a single one a drag queen or a trans person.   This one left me raw, maybe because it is late and I had a rough day but more likely if I admit the truth because of what the victims said.  I admit that I had to stop reading after that and go get an alcohol filled drink.  Even Odie who is sacked out on my desk lifted his head to look at me when I let out my gasp of anguish at this.   I won’t be graphic but those who have not been taken against their will / wishes really don’t understand the feelings those things bring up in those of us who have.  Even typing this I have had to wipe the tears from my eyes and blow my nose.   And this is not in anyway graphic!  It is just I can fill in the gaps, I know … Damn I know and at nearly 60 years old I still cannot forget.  Anyway it is a worthwhile read.   Hugs

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation also cited 400 alleged victims of Catholic sexual abuse since 1950
 
Avatar photoby HEMANT MEHTA

 

 
Report: 188 Catholic clergy members in Kansas are alleged predators | Catholic priest with hands on his head
Catholic priest with hands on his head (image via Shutterstock)
Reading Time: 3 MINUTES

 

Afour-year investigation into Kansas’ Catholic churches has found 188 alleged predators suspected of committing “aggravated criminal sodomy, rape, aggravated indecent liberties with a child and aggravated sexual battery.”

The report also says there were 400 victims of sexual abuse in the Kansas archdioceses since 1950, but in most of those cases, either the clergy member has died or the statute of limitations has long expired.

The [Kansas Bureau of Investigation] originally focused on reports of clergy sexual abuse in the state’s four Roman Catholic dioceses — Wichita, Salina, Dodge City and Kansas City, Kansas. It later expanded to include the Society of St. Pius X, a breakaway Catholic group known for its traditional Latin Mass with a large branch in St. Marys in northeast Kansas.

Some of the victims withheld vital information from investigators because they said they had signed non-disclosure agreements. In many cases, the report said, Church leaders failed to report allegations of abuse to law enforcement, failed to keep records of those allegations, and failed to conduct thorough internal investigations.

And, just as you’d suspect, there were instances where accused priests were merely shuffled to another parish while remaining on the Church’s payroll.

It’s a predictable yet troubling account of what we’ve seen in state after state ever since attorneys general began taking these matters seriously. After a Pennsylvania grand jury report came out in 2018, the floodgates opened. In some states, laws were enacted to put power back into the hands of victims by reopening a window for filing sexual abuse lawsuits that had previously been closed due to statutes of limitations. It’s not clear how Kansas politicians will act moving forward.

Whatever they do, if they do anything, it’ll be too late for some:

A few of the victims the task force dealt with were in prison and attributed that in part to the sexual abuse they’d endured as children, the report said.

“Our agents witnessed men, now in their 60s and 70s, break down in tears as they reported their sexual abuse to our team,” it said. “In many cases they have never previously disclosed the sexual abuse to anyone.

“Many times the victims thought they were the only victim of the offending priest. Following appropriate investigative interviews and actions, some victims learned for the first time they were not the only one the priest had abused.”

Some of the alleged victims had also died by suicide.

There are a couple of silver linings, that is if there can really be any in a situation like this.

One is that this investigation was requested by a Republican attorney general (Derek Schmidt), in response to a request from Kansas City Archdiocese Archbishop Joseph Naumann, which came after lawyers identified 15 clergy members who “warranted further investigation.” The people who may seem least likely to take these matters seriously did the right thing, though it’s possible public pressure had a lot to do with that.

The other is that the Church appears to be taking these matters more seriously. Too little, too late, no doubt, but it’s something. The allegations are more likely to have occurred decades ago than recently. That said, only a few dozen priests accused of abuse have been identified by name by the four dioceses in Kansas. The report suggests there are many more where those came from.

I would also highlight the report’s list of how the Catholic Church, despite cooperating with the KBI, hindered the investigation. The KBI cites non-disclosure agreements, Church officials using language that “minimized the seriousness or severity” of abuse, a failure to report abuse allegations to law enforcement, a lack of “transparent communication” with parishioners about the allegations, horrible recordkeeping policies, inadequate internal investigations, and an inability to hold people accountable for their roles in the abuse.

We knew a lot of those things already, but that means the Church’s willingness to assist with the investigation was hampered by the Church’s own actions in the past. The people who (sometimes unintentionally) destroyed evidence shouldn’t get much credit for supposedly opening their doors wide open to investigators.

As of now, no criminal charges have been filed in the 30 cases where the task force submitted affidavits. That’s likely because there are some hurdles (including death) that prosecutors can’t overcome. Justice will not be served in those cases.

Which means the only real consequence the Catholic Church in Kansas will ever face is the exodus of worshipers who call themselves Catholic. If you’re a Kansan who still attends or supports the Catholic Church with your time or money, you’re complicit in their actions. It’s not too late to break ties. Tradition is no excuse to prop up a criminal institution. If that leads to more of these dioceses going bankrupt, no one who cares about the victims is going to shed a tear. The Church has enough property and stashed artwork to sell to cover the costs of the trauma they’ve inflicted upon victims.

It’s long past time for the Catholic Church in Kansas (and everywhere else for that matter) to suffer for what it’s done to members. 

Avatar photo

HEMANT MEHTA

Hemant Mehta is the founder of FriendlyAtheist.com, a YouTube creator, podcast co-host, and author of multiple books about atheism. He can be reached at @HemantMehta. 

Is the Right to Contraception About To End in America?

https://hartmannreport.com/p/is-the-right-to-contraception-about?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share

My dogs that love gravy please make no mistake in thinking what these people are driving hard for.  It is not the 1950s as most of us assume, but for these die hard Christian white male power nationalists the goal is the 1850s.    Hugs

As of last week, Republican efforts to ban birth control in America have officially started, and teenagers in Texas are its first victims

 

Thom Hartmann
 
 
 
 
Image by Thomas Breher from Pixabay

To paraphrase Pastor Niemöller, first they came for our abortion rights. Now they’re coming for our birth control.

Psychologist Dr. Marty Klein notes at Psychology Today that there are typically only a few reasons why people oppose birth control. They are:

— Fundamentalist religions fear sexual pleasure, which birth control facilitates
— Contraception effectively limits family size, empowering women
— Contraception promotes personal autonomy [making women more likely to challenge male authority]
— Birth control may make abortion more acceptable to society

As of last week, Republican efforts to ban birth control in America have officially started, and teenagers in Texas are its first victims.

When Clarence Thomas wrote in his Dobbs concurring opinion that the Supreme Court should next overturn the right to birth control in the United States, a lawyer and a judge in Texas were apparently listening.

Most Americans have no idea this high-stakes drama — heading toward the Supreme Court but already now law in Texas — is even going on.

Lost in the Christmas holiday chatter, a Trump-appointed federal district judge in Texas just a week ago put a stop to teenagers getting confidential access to federally-funded birth control pills and devices in that state.

He did it based on a lawsuit filed by attorney Jonathan Mitchell, the same man who co-authored the Texas “abortion vigilante” law. Everybody ridiculed that effort at first, you’ll recall, but the Supreme Court upheld it and today it’s Texas law and spreading across Red states like a fungus.

Mitchell is also known as the guy who supported the Mississippi abortion ban before the Supreme Court that led to the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade.

Perhaps anticipating Clarence Thomas’ later call to overturn Supreme Court decisions legalizing birth control,  homosexual behavior, and gay marriage (Griswold v Connecticut, Lawrence v Texas, Obergefell v Hodges), Mitchell even wrote in his amicus brief for the Dobbs case an originalist reference similar to the argument the Texas judge would later make against birth control:

“The right to marry an opposite-sex spouse is ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’; the right to marry a same-sex spouse obviously is not.”

In the Texas federal lawsuit Mitchell brought, Deanda v. Becerra, Trump-appointed Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled that teens between 15 and 18 shouldn’t be able to make birth control decisions independent of their parents because, he ruled, that had always been the law in the early years of America:

“For centuries, the common law held minors were incapable of giving consent to make important life decisions.”

Somehow, he managed to overlook the fact that the age of sexual consent “for centuries” was, in every American state from the founding of this nation in 1789, 10 to 12 years old. It wasn’t raised to 14, 15, or 16 in any US state until the 1930s.

But don’t try to argue facts with people running on religious or male-power arguments.

Although the fight for women’s bodily autonomy is as old as time, this part of the story begins in 1970.

Richard Nixon had a reputation as an awkward, bumbling prude when it came to sex, but even he knew that teenagers should be able to get birth control without their parents’ consent.

A teenage pregnancy could destroy a young woman’s life, and, at that time, over one-in-ten girls became pregnant between 15 and 19 years old. Fully 92 percent of those teenage pregnancies, according to research published in the following decade, were unintended and could have been prevented with access to birth control.

So, in 1970, President Nixon signed into law Title X, a federal grant program that included funds for confidential access to birth control for people across the nation regardless of their age.

Nonprofit agencies were formed in each state to receive the federal money and provide birth control (among other services): in Texas “Every Body Texas” is the group that administers Title X statewide through 32 agencies and 156 clinics.

The week of Christmas, because of Kacsmaryk’s Deanda v. Becerraruling, Texas agencies affiliated with Every Body Texas learned they had to start turning away teenagers, virtually all of them girls and women, who were seeking confidential birth control.

This is now the law in Texas.

Picking up the beat, Republican legislators in Missouri, Idaho, and Louisiana have introduced or are proposing birth control bans in those states, according to the Pew Trust. Expect Republicans in your state to soon try the same.

Lest you think that hyperbolic, consider how Republicans in the US House and Senate voted when Democrats introduced the Right to Contraception Actimmediatelyafter Clarence Thomas suggested the Court should overturn that right.

Fully 195 Republicans voted against the legislation in the House; only 8 supported it. And when it reached the Senate, it was killed by a Republican filibuster.

The Deanda v. Becerradecision in Texas banning confidential dispensing of contraception to teenagers will be appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, known across the nation as the place most likely to uphold crackpot rightwing rulings. From there it goes to the six crackpot rightwingers on the Supreme Court.

Republicans appear quite fixated on banning both abortion and birth control nationwide.

Authoritarian societies have a long history of trying to regulate women’s bodies.

The first books the Nazis burned in May of 1933 were birth control guides by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, shortly before Hitler banned birth control in that nation (soldiers were allowed to possess condoms “to maintain their good health”).

Birth control was similarly banned in Romania by Nicolae Ceaușescu, bringing that nation Europe’s highest infant mortality rate and lowest life expectancy (particularly for women), a legacy which continues to this day even though Ceaușescu was overthrown and killed in 1989.

And now the GOP wants to ban birth control in the United States, starting with the youngest and most vulnerable among us. Authoritarians, after all, always first attack those least able to defend themselves before they climb the ladder of the society they intend to conquer.

This opening shot — coming out of Texas, just like the first ban on abortion (and from the same lawyer) — should make all Americans sit up and take notice.