Senate passes bills to spiritually groom minors

I started the day by accidentally flushing my wedding ring down the toilet, how was your day? (It’s definitely gone, but it’s fine.)

My attention today was directed at the full Senate’s discussion of the slate of “religious freedom” bills — dedicated prayer times in schools, ten commandments in every classroom, criminalizing providing/selling/allowing children to see certain books, banning drag queen storytime events in libraries. There were some fiery moments. If you’re looking for Texas Democrats who show more spine than, say, Chuck Schumer, look no further than Sen. Roland Guttierez (D-San Antonio) and Sen. Nathan Johnson (D-Dallas).

Sen. Guttierez came at Mayes Middleton for his bill that essentially puts the age-old “what is pornography?” question into the hands of cops. The book he is holding here is “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.”

The best moment is when Guttierez responds to Middleton’s wildly ridiculous example with, “well, I don’t know, I haven’t read the book yet. I guess I need to call the cops and have them read the book.” OOH, GIRL. GET HIM.

Next we have Sen. Johnson calling Middleton a liar to his face, and it’s delicious.

If you haven’t read Rob Downen’s piece in the Texas Tribune that gives context to where all of these bills come from and how emboldened Christian nationalists have become this session, please do.

Efforts by the Christian Right to put more of their religion in public schools are not new. But the tone of those debates in Texas has shifted this session, with bill supporters and some lawmakers openly arguing that such legislation is crucial to combating dropping church participation rates and what they say is a directly related decline in American morality.

Throughout those hearings, lawmakers and bill supporters frequently said that church-state separation is a myth meant to obscure America’s true, Christian roots. They argued that many of America’s ills are the natural consequence of removing Biblical morality from classrooms. And they framed their legislation as an antidote to decreasing church attendance, communism or eternal hellfire.

This is insidious stuff, dudes.

This evening I’m watching the Senate Health and Human Services committee hearings on some “personal liberty” health bills — increasing vaccine warnings, making it easier for healthcare workers to deny care on religious beliefs.

Molly Cook is on this committee and she’s doing a good job of questioning the bill authors, so there’s that. But then there’s Sheila Hemphill.

Ms. Hemphill is a frequent flyer in legislature hearings. She represents an organization called Texas Right to Know, which I gather is just a bad website and a low-engagement Facebook page. I cannot figure out how she has the financial security to allow her to spend days and days at the Texas capitol to espouse crackpot conspiracy theories. As I write this, she is crying about the military giving the COVID vaccine to soldiers. Crying. She ALWAYS brings handouts, because what boomer doesn’t love to print out some facts they found on the internet.

In looking through whatever I could find out about Hemphill, I found that in 2013 she was instrumental in changing the city charter in her town of Brady to ensure the right of residents to refuse the installation of smart meters on their property.

Bear with me as I take you on a journey.

I began working at CenterPoint Energy as its social media strategist/manager in 2012, right when smart meters were starting to roll out to the Houston area. This was a huge undertaking, bolstered by federal dollars. And now you don’t even think of it, do you? Your power goes out and you get a text or an email from your utility saying, “Hi, we see that your power is out. We might know why. We might have a restoration estimate for you.” That’s all because of smart meters, which do nothing more than electronically relay to the utility whether or not an electric meter is on or off.

WELL, LET ME TELL YOU. PEOPLE DID NOT LIKE THIS. People like Sheila Hemphill.

Sheila Hemphill, an organizer of the effort, called the victory her “San Jacinto.”

Critics have raised concerns about health and privacy. They say they fear the cumulative effect of the meters’ radiation emissions. The Public Utility Commission found no health risks in a 2012 study that blamed social media for spreading inaccurate information.

Some critics have concerns about sovereignty; Texas, unlike other states, controls its own electricity interconnection. Thelma Taormina, founder of the We the People Are the 912 Association, a Houston-based Tea Party group that advocates for smart meter opt-out options, gained notoriety over a news report that when a meter installer arrived at her home, she met him carrying a gun. She said she was concerned about the role smart meters might play in the future.

“The ultimate goal of the smart grid, of which smart meters are a part, is to connect us internationally to share the power we generate with the world,” she said.

More than a decade later, smart meters have proven to be an efficient tool to improve utility operations and communications. Maybe Hemphill still has her old analog meter, just like she’s probably rawdogging life without vaccines.

Oh, anyway, apparently this “the COVID vaccine turns kids trans” is a thing that I didn’t know about.

OAN’s Real America aired perhaps the strangest of all anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, postulating that aborted fetal cells in common childhood vaccines are responsible for transgender teenagers.

“Anti-vax” troll and guest host Alex Stein summed up Dr. Ben Tapper’s argument: “There are two cultures of aborted fetal cells, one male and one female, and these aborted fetal cells are used in different vaccines. … Ben theorizes that sometimes, putting an opposite-gender aborted fetal cell culture in a young child, as their body and cerebral cortex are developing the fastest, is what is causing the gender dysphoria in teenagers.”

Tapper is an anti-vaccine chiropractor who, in 2021, was named one of the “Disinformation Dozen” for his outsized contribution to COVID-19 disinformation online. Tapper’s big idea, which he admitted was mere “speculation,” is not supported by any scientific evidence. While several vaccines are developed with cell strains originally grown from fetal tissue, vaccines do not contain fetal tissue -- and there’s simply no evidence that vaccinations somehow cause gender dysphoria.

Even Sen. Kolkhorst had a moment of “not you again.” Sorry, that’s me laughing.

Today, Dan Patrick visited The Happy Cactus Apothecary in Austin to I guess prove that children are purchasing THC in droves:

The owners of a hemp store in Austin got a surprise visit Tuesday from Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, who owners said walked into their store asking how many children buy their products.

Patrick also was in for a surprise himself, when store employees carded him, said Todd Harris, one of the owners of The Happy Cactus Apothecary in Austin.

“One of our employees said she asked for his ID, and he said ‘I’m Dan Patrick.’ And she said, ‘I still need to see your ID,’” Harris said.

Amazing that the employee didn’t laugh in his face. Oh THE Dan Patrick?!?!

Call to action for Wednesday/Thursday on upcoming election bills:

Sign up for this webinar on Wednesday:

Texas lawmakers will hear a lineup of consequential election bills this Thursday, 3/20. Two of the most dangerous proposals, SB 16 and SB 76, threaten to fundamentally change our elections for the worse. SB 16 would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, while SB 76 seeks to eliminate the countywide polling place program, restricting where Texans can cast their ballots.

Join us for this urgent webinar as we break down these harmful bills, their potential consequences, and how you can take action to protect voting rights in Texas.

Hosted by: Common Cause Texas, Vote Riders, ACLU of Texas, Texas Freedom Network, MOVE Texas, Texas Civil Rights Project, and others

Three. Good. Things.

1. Fizzy water.
2. Planning a vacation.
3. With the loss of my modest silver wedding ring, we can give time to envisioning what our wedding bands should look like. If you don’t know about our wedding, you can just watch it here and ask me questions later, but suffice to say that our wedding rings were purchased quickly and without much thought to sentimentality. This June marks our tenth wedding anniversary, so I’m ready to go all in on a symbol that we can appreciate and feel connected to for the rest of our time together.