Texas Civil Rights Review

Category: Uncategorized

  • Half Mast for Rosa

    If we had a flag, we’d lower it half way for a month.  Dear
    Rosa,  please don’t let us rest in peace until we are worthy.–gm

  • Reproductive Rights Funds Go to Anti-Abortion Counseling

    By Greg Moses

    First you make their pregnancies more likely, then you dismantle
    services that would support their children, finally you talk them out
    of
    abortion. This is the new "pro-life" regime of public policy, thanks to the
    Texas Legislature.

    In a personal account of being turned away
    from her annual exam, an Austin Indymedia
    reporter writes about the morning she and 25 other
    women ("women of color of course!") were advised by Planned Parenthood
    staff of the new state order. A story at the Planned Parenthood
    website explains that funding was shifted by the legislature "from
    family planning clinics, such as Planned Parenthood, that provide
    health services and contraception for low-income women, to so-called
    ‘pregnancy counseling clinics’ that devote their resources to
    convincing women who have unintended pregnancies not to have abortions".

    Similar stories have been written in Amarillo, Waco, and Pharr. The Brownsville
    Herald reports that "1,500 women in Brownsville may lose access to the
    services the clinics in town provide, such as: diabetes and
    hypertension screenings, women’s health exams, cervical and breast
    cancer screenings and birth control."

    In an AP story archived at North Texas
    Planned Parenthood, researchers find that over the past decade an
    increasing percent of births are not wanted by mothers. The AP
    report trades quotes between anti-abortion activists who say the trend
    shows a "pro-life" shift and reproductive rights activists who say the
    numbers reflect decreased access to "abortion providers."

    Strangely missing from the AP report is consideration of the logical
    possibility that the increasing number of unwanted births might also
    reflect how the attack on "abortion providers" has resulted in
    decreased availability of birth control services, as reported by Austin
    Indymedia.

    Also missing from the analysis is consideration of the effect of
    worsening conditions for parenthood over the past decade, exemplified
    in Texas by attacks on children’s health insurance. Poor family
    services might also account for why mothers increasingly report
    unwanted births.

    The problem with the so-called anti-abortion agenda is that it focuses
    too narrowly on a single, isolated moment of choice. The effective
    result is a war on rights to reproduction and parenthood.

    To reduce the
    number of abortions requires attention to an expanded range of
    choices, not only in terms of whether to have an abortion or not, but
    in terms of birth control and support for parenthood services,
    too. But since the broader agenda would involve empowerment and
    solidarity, the so-called anti-abortion movement is not
    interested. What they prefer is a hypocritical agenda of judgment and
    constraint that reminds us of the Right Rev. Dimsdale in Hawthorne’s
    "Scarlett Letter". What they really mean by "pro-life" is
    pro-patriarchal control.

    A
    true agenda of liberation would make the choice of abortion less likely
    by increasing the percentage of planned and wanted pregnancies in an
    environment that welcomes children through robust services for health
    and education. Try telling that to the legislature in Texas.

  • Texas Supreme Court Sides with Rich Districts for Now

    Here is the bottom line paragraph from today’s judgment from the Texas Supreme Court:

    We now hold, as did the district court, that local ad
    valorem taxes have become a state property tax in violation of article
    VIII, section 1-e, as we warned ten years ago they inevitably would,
    absent a change in course, which has not happened. Although the
    districts have offered evidence of deficiencies in the public school
    finance system, we conclude that those deficiencies do not amount to a
    violation of article VII, section 1. We remain convinced, however, as
    we were sixteen years ago, that defects in the structure of the public
    school finance system expose the system to constitutional
    challenge. Pouring more money into the system may forestall those
    challenges, but
    only for a time. They will repeat until the system is overhauled.

    This means that the lawsuit initiated by ‘rich districts’ (the West
    Orange Cove plaintiffs) has succeeded. They can tax and spend at higher
    rates.

    In the short run, the court is ruling against further claims
    by intervenors from ‘poor districts’ (Edgewood and Alvarado plaintiffs)
    that the funding of Texas schools is otherwise unconstitutional because
    of alleged inequality and poor overall performance. But the court warns
    that this short term ruling may be quite short term indeed if state
    policy makers read this ruling as a vote of confidence.  Oooh.  Bet that’ll scare them into action!–gm

  • The Time Was Now: How the Texas High Court Failed the People

    By Greg Moses

    IndyMedia Austin / Houston / NorthTexas

    In the relationship between knowledge and freedom, children derive
    their right to free education. Take for example the Texas constitution
    of 1875 (Article VII, Section 1):

    A general diffusion of knowledge being essential to the
    preservation of the liberties and rights of the people, it shall be the
    duty of the Legislature of the State to establish and make suitable
    provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of
    public free schools.

    Into this succinct line of reasoning is packed a serious claim.
    Where there is no suitable education, there can be no real hope of
    preserving rights and liberties; therefore, elected representatives
    have a duty to establish, support, and maintain public schools.

    Yet in the wake of the latest collective judgment handed down by the
    Texas Supreme Court, we are left shaking our heads. The court has
    affirmed that Texas is dead last among the fifty states of the USA when
    it comes to high school literacy among adults 25 and older. And the
    court has stipulated that high-school-dropout rates consume fully half
    of the state’s Hispanic students and nearly half of African Americans.
    Yet, the court finds this system of public education adequate,
    suitable, and efficient.
    Had the court wanted to signal a higher standard of respect
    for ‘essential’ conditions of education, justices could not have
    concocted a more timely environment. A state district court had already
    ruled the education system unconstitutional, and the legislature had
    convened several special sessions ordered by the governor in open
    admission that something better should be done. But legislators, time
    after time, had failed; until finally they said it might be better to
    wait until the high court gave guidance.

    Because the trial court, the governor, and the legislature were already
    behaving as if a constitutional crisis in education had been reached,
    the Texas high court had only to stand squarely on the side of the
    rights and liberties of the people to issue a profound and lifting
    command. Yet the court retreated from the rights of the people and
    aligned itself instead with the prerogatives of a decadent legislature,
    whose inability to agree on some better course of action now stands in
    a sentimental glow of constitutional sympathy.

    Instead of casting into 21st Century law a progressive
    commitment to vigorous support for the “essential” institution of
    public ed, the court tottered backward, deferred to backward looking
    comparisons, and anchored its logic squarely in 19th Century habits of
    mind that have usually blunted the keen logic of the constitution.

    With a decisive choice before it, whether to raise
    expectations for the people or lower expectations for the legislature,
    the court decided that deference to the legislature was its wisest
    course. And so the court, when served up with a critical and hard-fought
    opportunity to enliven the relationship between knowledge and liberty
    among the people (an opportunity that will take many years to rebuild)–the court abandons its rare and recent tradition
    of trying to be part of the public education solution.

    In its deferential (cozy) embrace of the legislature, the
    court decided that so long as the legislature is not being “arbitrary”
    in its provision of education, its crucial provisions for the rights
    and liberties of the people cannot be second guessed.

    But what requires the court to be deferential to the legislature when
    it comes to assessing public education, especially if public education
    is so clearly founded on the need to preserve the liberties and rights
    of the people? It is to the liberties and rights of the people that the
    court is more urgently bound to defer, not to the liberties and rights
    of the legislature.

    A plain reading of the legislature’s actions since 1875 prove
    that in the absence of a jealous court, the state legislature tends to
    deflate the concept of public education, preferring to keep the rights
    and liberties of some people hostage to the rights and liberties of
    others. The paradigm for this pattern is marked out in two words: Jim
    Crow.

    Or to put it another way, if a jealous court is not actively
    protecting the rights and liberties of the people one and all, then the
    promise and hope of democracy loses an essential foundation of
    legitimacy within the state structure upheld by that court. A lousy
    court results not only in a lousy state, but in lousy hopes that the
    state can ever be democratically reformed. Yet the court in this case
    seems to believe that a lousy court can motivate a lousy legislature to
    do what it has never voted to do to date without court pressure. As a result of the court
    ruling, the promise of education for democracy in Texas is once again a revolutionary hope.

  • Klan joins Republicans and Christians to Campaign for Discrimination

    It’s not just that the Klan has joined Republicans and Christians in
    the initiative to constitutionalize homophobia in Texas. The
    Klan’s logic is the same. Go ahead guess: Governor, Preacher, or Grand Dragon, who said this?
    "We believe that as Christians we have an obligation under god to take
    a stand against homosexuality. Homosexuality is a sin and an
    abomination to God and goes against our Lord’s plans for the human
    race."
    Purely on a theological level we wonder, do the Lord’s plans for the human race involve free choices of conscience?

    For quite a different message than the Klan coalition’s, try No Nonsense in November