lone star bad faith bureaucracy

Dy­lan said I ex­plained this well, so lemme try and recre­ate it here.

The “Amer­i­can Tal­iban” re­ac­tion to what’s play­ing out in Texas is weird.

It has racist and xeno­pho­bic sub­text, im­ply­ing that op­pres­sion and sub­ju­ga­tion is an in­ven­tion of those brown peo­ple, over there, be­ing ex­port­ed from them to us.

And those im­pli­ca­tions are, in ad­di­tion to be­ing in iso­la­tion fucked up, ahis­toric. Re­mem­ber, Rea­gan in­di­rect­ly helped form the Tal­iban through fund­ing the Mu­jahideen.

And if any­thing, the Tal­iban are Mid­dle East­ern Re­pub­li­cans.

Op­press­ing women and stag­ing coups is kin­da the Re­pub­li­can thing.

To put it less glib and more di­rect:
con­ser­vatism so se­vere it forces uterus own­ers to be CIS­gen­der, preg­nant, and un­e­d­u­cat­ed is lit­er­al­ly OUR ex­port.

Leav­ing ex­pla­na­tion and get­ting into fur­ther thoughts: It might seem stu­pid to fix­ate on se­man­tics, but I don’t agree.

The white fem­i­nist ten­den­cy of the last few years to try to melt com­plex, dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tions down to cute lit­tle slo­gans and Handmaid’s Tale ref­er­ences per­pet­u­ates all sorts of oth­er ‑isms and un­crit­i­cal bi­ased think­ing, and alien­ates the peo­ple who are vic­tim of that mind­set.

It’s also per­pet­u­ates mis­in­for­ma­tion, and per­pet­u­at­ed mis­in­for­ma­tion spe­cif­ic to this sit­u­a­tion, like that fe­tal heart­beat bills are dis­man­tling roe v wade.

Fe­tal heart­beat bills have al­ready been de­clared un­con­sti­tu­tion­al, but Texas S.B. 8 was writ­ten in bad faith to ob­fus­cate le­gal process, and they did that by mak­ing it en­force­able ex­CLU­SIVE­LY by pri­vate cit­i­zens via law­suits, with pay­outs of at least ten grand per proven com­mit­ted abor­tion if they win.

It may feel like I’m split­ting hairs, but it lit­er­al­ly changes what the fight looks like. It’s not against fe­tal heart­beat bills, it’s against bu­reau­crats who know the law com­plex­ly and will wield that knowl­edge for evil.

It’s uh … kin­da al­ways been that.

It’s the en­e­my on ba­si­cal­ly all fronts right now. THAT has been our unique­ly Amer­i­can prob­lem for decades, and sim­pli­fy­ing this whole thing to “tal­iban-es­que ide­ol­o­gy is tak­ing our abor­tions from us” ERAS­ES IT.

That’s what made clog­ging the pro-life whistle­blow­er lines and putting pres­sure on the serv­er hosts so ef­fec­tive, it was fight­ing bad faith bu­reau­cra­cy with bad faith bu­reau­cra­cy.

We need le­gal minds writ­ing and en­act­ing bills like “you can only sue pro-life pro­test­ers and pro-life clin­ics for dam­ages for every per­son whose abor­tion they in­ter­fered with if you’re a pri­vate cit­i­zen,” since that’s, uh, so far cool with The Supreme Court.

And then we need peo­ple who help the poor­est and most dis­en­fran­chised file those law­suits and nav­i­gate that le­gal sys­tem for the $10k+ check at the end.

And we need to fig­ure out how to get on the of­fen­sive with the leg­is­la­tion.

I’m spit­balling here, I don’t claim to have The So­lu­tions but first down is al­ready in play.

And I just do know that none of this has any­thing to do with Mid­dle East pol­i­tics.

 

—mel­ony ppenosyne

Flom­mist Mel­ony Ppenosyne is a writer and weird artist type. In the last year alone, she’s trav­eled to Vir­ginia as a com­pet­ing poet, co-writ­ten a play on men­tal ill­ness that is present­ly be­ing pro­duced, and craft­ed a pub­lished es­say check­ing the priv­i­lege and scope of art gal­leries. Copy­right © 2021 Mel­ony Ppenosyne. Top foto source.

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