The smirking gentleman to the right has proposed a law to the Texas legislature that would make abortion a crime punishable by death. Of the woman.
A Republican state lawmaker in Texas has reintroduced a bill that would criminalize abortion without exception, making it possible for women to be convicted of homicide and sentenced to death for having the procedure.
Texas state Rep. Tony Tinderholt (R) was placed under state protection in 2017 when he first introduced the bill because of the death threats he received, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
Of course that’s the important news, that Tinderholt received death threats, not that he’s threatening to execute a substantial number of women for their “immorality”. This is not the first time Tinderholt has been in the news. He has condemned Sharia law, oblivious to the fact that threatening legalized murder of women is about as barbaric and primitive as it gets. He is also committed to protecting the sanctity of marriage and has been frantic in his opposition to gay marriage.
He’s big on personal responsibility.
“Right now, it’s real easy,” Tinderholt told the Texas Observer in 2017. “Right now, they don’t make it important to be personally responsible because they know that they have a backup of ‘oh, I can just go get an abortion.’ Now, we both know that consenting adults don’t always think smartly sometimes. But consenting adults need to also consider the repercussions of the sexual relationship that they’re gonna have, which is a child.”
He has been married 5 times.
Man, that dude is a hypocritical dumbass. I hope his bill gets slapped down hard, but you never know…it’s Texas.
No, because it being Texas, it’ll likely pass. Then, immediately be challenged in court, where the asshole brigade will be out in droves flocking to the court to protest the right to have redress of grievances, because it costs the state too much, ignoring the major self-inflicted bullet hole in their own feet.
You know, pass a religious based, unconstitutional law, expect to see it get overturned in court, appealed, upheld verdict, appealed again, rinse and repeat and bitch about the cost.
But, zealots are utterly predictable. Alas, that breed didn’t become extinct at Masada.
Because, there were zealots before there was a concept that that group so well illustrated.
He’s been married 5 times?! Who?… what?… why?… life makes non sense
I know I typoed Non sense but I like it. I stand by my post!
The “current year argument” is changing its meaning. Now if you’re like, “How can this happen in this day and age?” it just can’t mean the same thing it meant a few years ago when people had hope of human progress. This is an era of reactionary ascendance, open fascism across the globe, of murderous oppression.
This piece of shit says it’s easy to get an abortion when he knows damn well his side has made it close to impossible for disadvantaged people, has made his state’s maternal death rate the literal highest in the “first world.” Fuck Texas so much. Not all the people. They’re already fucked. Fuck Texas as a concept, as an institution.
There was some libertarian weirdo down there that convinced a small town to eliminate a bunch of public services, causing it to turn into a cartoonish hellscape. There were rusting cop cars on the mayor’s lawn, wild dogs terrorizing the streets, rivers of shit, fire, the whole nine. A shadow government was meeting in like a bowling alley or something, trying to mitigate the damage until they got arrested.
Maybe the whole state could benefit from that treatment. This guy wants it medieval, I say bust it back to the paleolithic and let humans build it up from the ruins. It’s better than this kind of shit.
I am shocked, just shocked, that an anti-choice conservative is using a fetal personhood law as the rationale for classifying abortion as homicide, that a fetal personhood law would be weaponized against actual born people who get abortions to put them at potential risk of not only prison but state sanctioned execution. Literally no one ever warned this could happen, repeatedly and at top volume since the very first fetal personhood bill was proposed, why didn’t anyone tell us.
/s
Per The Hill,
It’s interesting Tinderholt thinks a TX state bill should override the Feds, the President, and every single one of the courts. Yeah, interesting, that’s the word.
First, I am the same age as PZ, so got to experience the weird sexist world of being a female nerd in high school during the early 1970s. I took summer school classes to graduate early in my quest to get out of the withering version of Hades known as “high school.” Plus my step-mom thought I would be bored (later she remarked she should have prevented me from graduating early, I told her she did not have a choice, especially since I did all the work to get into college myself).
One was a creative writing class with a “character” as a teacher. Out of about a dozen students there was one guy. We had to an oral presentation of our version of Utopia. I have no memory of what my contribution was, but I do remember the one male student going on about a tourist based industry where “girls” who got pregnant out of wedlock would be executed. I responded to this shouting that it takes two, what about the guys who helped create the pregnancy*. The teacher shut me down.
I think about this every time I read about the punishments that applied to women, and very seldom to men. Especially since around that time young women were vilified for getting pregnant, but young men were adulated when they “scored.”
Fortunately, not all teachers in that high school were sexist cretins without a heart. My World History teacher was the one that stopped class and drove a student to the hospital a mile away when she went into a very rapid labor.
Now my question to that clueless legislator is why he thinks women who have ectopic pregnancies should die. If they have the pregnancy removed they are executed. Though if they let it progress the growth outside the uterus, the bleeding may be fatal. It happens in about one in fifty pregnancies: https://www.marchofdimes.org/complications/ectopic-pregnancy.aspx
I tended to speak out in class. Starting in sixth grade I started a habit of not just raising my hand, but also standing up. This is something that I am reminded of by reading the vintage Doonesbury comics on GoComics are where preschool Alex is being ignored.
In one article I saw on this, the committee chairman said he wouldn’t let the bill get out of committee with civil or criminal penalties for the woman. So…there’s at least one semi-sane person in all this. (Why he would think the bill–if it became law–would have any effect with no penalities, I don’t know, but it sure beats the alternative.)
I like how these guys always chide women for not taking responsibility while never, or barely ever, mentioning the other half of the equation. …Nor do they seem to have any clue as to the many situations that can lead to unwanted pregnancy. Remember that TV show “Quantum Leap”? That guy needs to be transmuted into the shoes of a young teenaged girl too naive, overwhelmed or intimidated to say no.
How much do ya wanna bet he’s also against sex education and easy availability of birth control?
“They don’t have ideas, they have /intentions/.”
This is what scares me of a larger and larger slice of humanity: no attempt at consistency, no attempt at self reflection and no attempt at empathy.
They are Right, so they have no need to question their ends, and their ends are Right so they always justify the means, the rest be damned, literally.
@7 They just don’t expect the rules don’t apply to them
Your comparison with Islamic Sharia law is apt. It actually permits abortion. Admittedly there are certain conditions to it but it certainly doesn’t prescribe the death penalty for having one. In fact unlike the US is one of the world leaders in stem cell research because there are no religious restrictions placed on it and fetal stem cells are readily available.
I don’t begrudge anyone 5+ marriages, but it’s pretty funny how he characterized some of his as for insurance purposes only. (Less funny that a couple of them ended because his wives had enough of his abuse.) Government should grant him his tax and insurance fraud, we get stuck with the bill, but heaven forfend we subsidize sluts their slut pills and grant them any medical care, effectively making it a crime for someone to take steps to avoid their own deatj (unless and until it’s meted out by the state as punishment for having tried).
Yeah, no exceptions for incest or rape (or rapey incest, I guess), and with 5 marriages under his belt seems unable to keep his pecker in his pants.
So “death penalty for abortion” to shut up the young’ns that he got nasty with? It would be irresponsible not to speculate.
“That man needed shootin'”, wise words out of the Ungovernable Tribal Regions of Texdumbfuckistan. Make it so.
I have a new way of stopping these assholes.
Every time a abortion limiting or blocking legislation is introduced, a democrat should introduce an amendment to say that the punishment should apply to state’s residents even if they get the abortion done outside the state/country and should apply to all the ‘conspirators’ in the said abortion.
Once you plug up the loophole of wealthy people flying to California to have an abortion, abortion laws will absolutely shrivel up and die. After all, “all life is precious for pro-coat-hangers, but not more precious than billionaires’ whims and fancies”.
By the invariable Law of Republican Projection, this guy must make Caligula look like Andy Griffith. And he must be personally aborting three fetuses a day.
I think the only explanation of this sort of thing is the view that the fetus is god’s punishment for screwing. And abortion is shirking that punishment. That’s why you take away birth control, too. That’s why you take away any aid, so the mother has to watch her child grow up hungry, uneducated, ie doomed. That’s why god made birth so torturous for the mother, etc etc etc.
Yes, because they love children so much – what bunk.
Isn’t “hypocritical dumbass” implied in the earlier statement that he’s a Republican lawmaker?
Ten to one he has made one of his girl friends -men like him always have girl friends -have an a abortion .
How long until Texas makes it illegal for pregnant women to travel to California?
Behold, the Texas GOP Platform: http://www.texasgop.org/platform/ hurl
I’m inclined to believe that not only do Texas Republicans want to turn back the clock to the 19th century, but their ultimate goal is to replace third world countries as a base for cheap manufacturing labor.
A manufacture-based economy requires a source of expendable, dirt-cheap labor. Poor people churning out babies (combined with elimination of wage laws) would be just the ticket to driving labor costs down. Cheap manufacturing on U.S. soil would be a dream come true for corporations, since that would eliminate the cost and trouble of foreign manufacturing.
I don’t think he’s putting this out there because he’s clueless. His legislation is an example of performative cruelty; virtue signalling to his constituents that he’s as self-righteously vicious against reproductive self-autonomy as they are.
As with others above, I don’t think it would be hard to find out that he’s got some skeletons of hypocrisy and/or corruption in his closet.
Married 5 times? Maybe he truly has no clue about sex, sexuality, pregnancy, and parenthood. Nothing about his own personal responsibility either.