Posted on 07/13/2013 2:11:12 AM PDT by lbryce
The Texas Senate gave final passage on Friday to one of the strictest anti-abortion measures in the country, legislation championed by Gov. Rick Perry, who rallied the Republican-controlled Legislature late last month after a Democratic filibuster blocked the bill and intensified already passionate resistance by abortion-rights supporters.
The bill would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and hold abortion clinics to the same standards as hospital-style surgical centers, among other requirements. Its supporters say that the strengthened requirements for the structures and doctors will protect women’s health; opponents argue that the restrictions are actually intended to put financial pressure on the clinics that perform abortions and will force most of them to shut their doors.
Mr. Perry applauded lawmakers for passing the bill, saying “Today the Texas Legislature took its final step in our historic effort to protect life.” Legislators and anti-abortion activists, he said “tirelessly defended our smallest and most vulnerable Texans and future Texans.”
Debate over the bill has ignited fierce exchanges between lawmakers, and tense confrontations between opponents of the bill, who have worn orange, and supporters of the bill wearing blue. Signs and slogans have been everywhere, bearing long, impassioned arguments or the simple scrawl on a young man’s orange shirt, a Twitter-esque “@TXLEGE: U R dumb.”
The bill had come nearly this far before: a version had been brought to the Senate in the previous session of the Legislature, in June, and was killed by State Senator Wendy Davis, a Democrat from Fort Worth, with an 11-hour filibuster that stalled the bill until after the deadline for ending the session. The filibuster became an overnight sensation on Twitter and other forms of social media, with more than 180,000 people viewing the filibuster live online
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Yes. As I said earlier, what difference does it make after you, and those who think like you do, have dynamited the foundations for the rule of law in this country? All of your statistics are nothing more than another excuse to obfuscate your own lack of principle.
Yet, Texas, even before the passage of this law already had a better record (per capita) than Iowa. About twice as good.
So if Texas, which, as you have said, has adopted the same strategy as Iowa, why then is Iowa so much further behind?
If you want to lecture TX - try cleaning up your backyard in Iowa. Let’s see some of those clinics shut down.
Then - you can tell Texas whatever you want.
I have no interest in the sort of "relevance" that requires ignoring every principle that our claim to liberty absolutely relies upon.
Texas took up Obama’s promise to make abortions “more rare”. I’m sure Obama will soon announce congratulations for Texas doing so.
Obfuscation. You continue to ignore any of the substance of what is morally, constitutionally fatal about the legislation you support. You simply can’t deal with it.
Wendy was handing out samples for the maggot pro-aborts to put in their jars for souveniers.
“It’s also an impotent stand at a critical time in our nation’s history when we need potent people and ideas.”
Amen. Sir. A-fricken-men. Lead, follow or get out of the way.
The American future smiles at Texas.
If Planned Parenthood v. Casey had gone 5-4 the other way in 1992 then I’m confident TX would have already gone back to the pre Roe ban, but this law has at least a chance of surviving at SCOTUS.
We need to make sure Kennedy understands there could be gay babies saved by this law. Haha
I wish he would keep the session going and pass the Sanctuary Cities ban Dewhurst torpedoed on the orders of Bob Perry 2 years ago.
Amen.
And 11 senators think its fine killing that age and older.
Consolidation is very effective at limiting abortion here in Texas. What PP does is try to farm what it makes from Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and yes, Austin and uses it to fund abortion throughout the rest of the state. They even have a clinic in San Angelo.
What will, hopefully, happen - are 4 big clinics and nothing in the rest of Texas. Even with shenanigans like in New Mexico, there is really very little that PP can do. Appeal to OK? OK has an even better record. LA? LA is already trying to hold up MS.
NM? Maybe for West Texas, but all that relies on one doctor.
So far PP has been able to avoid massive gaps > 500 miles - but that is with an increasingly tenuous chain of clinics. If Billiings were to shut down, that’s about half of MT, half of SD, half of ND.
Here’s what you don’t get - people being a day’s drive is crucial - especially with a wait period of a day. Are people willing to spend a day driving there, get into appointment, stay for the wait period and then drive back? That’s 4 days.
We cannot simultaneously demand that our lawmakers respect the Constitution while cheering wildly when they violate every stated purpose of the document, along with its most important explicit IMPERATIVE requirements.
Where do you get the idea that keeping the oath is optional, anyhow?
“The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution..."-- Article VI, the United States Constitution
What part of "bound" do you fail to understand?
-- President George Washington"Let it simply be asked, ‘Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths?"
I call it a good start.
But Texas did the right thing for the time. God bless Texas!
Again, the God-given, unalienable, EQUAL right to live is supposed to be protected by LAW in this republic, not by travel inconvenience.
And 19 of them think it's fine killing all of them, as long as it is done on their arbitrary schedule.
See, the disconnect between you and me is that you’re making godless, immoral Utilitarian arguments, and I’m making scriptural, moral, constitutional arguments. There’s just no reckoning those two completely adverse world-views.
The irony, of course, is that in the end, Utilitarianism just doesn’t work, as it violates the laws of nature.
You always reap what you sow, in its season. Everything reproduces after its kind.
“True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrong-doing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, although neither have any effect on the wicked. It is a sin to try to alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal a part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by Senate or People, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for He is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge. Whoever is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human nature, and by reason of this very fact he will suffer the worst penalties, even if he escapes what is commonly called punishment ...”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero, 59 - 47 B.C.
“Human law is law only by virtue of its accordance with right reason; and thus it is manifest that it flows from the eternal law. And in so far as it deviates from right reason it is called an unjust law; in such case it is no law at all, but rather a species of violence.”
— Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Ia-Ilae, q. xciii, art. 3, ad 2m.
“Good and wise men, in all ages...have supposed, that the deity, from the relations, we stand in, to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is, indispensably, obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever.”
“This is what is called the law of nature, which, being coeval with mankind, and dictated by God himself, is, of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries at all times. No human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid, derive all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original.”
— William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Law of England (1765)
“[A]ll men are equally bound by the laws of nature, or to speak more properly, the laws of the Creator.”
— Samuel Adams
“When human laws contradict or discountenance the means, which are necessary to preserve the essential rights of any society, they defeat the proper end of all laws, and so become null and void.”
— Alexander Hamilton
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