Last May, I wrote about a punitive law in Texas that terrified the state’s 300 or so independent bookstores. The law, House Bill 900, required bookstores to rate every book they sold—now and in the past— to school libraries.
The bookstores sued to overturn to the law, arguing that the administrative burden of complying would put most of them out of business.
Their suit succeeded at the District Court level. Then it advanced to the very conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the plaintiffs were fearful. [A sign of the times: Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when the federal courts were constantly challenged to enforce the Brown decision of 1954, the Fifth Circuit was considered highly liberal in facing down segregationists.]
The lawsuit, which was filed by Houston’s Blue Willow Bookshop and Austin-based BookPeople, along with a group of free speech organizations, argued that HB 900’s requirement essentially compelled the private businesses to engage in speech by requiring them to create a rating system for the materials they sold.
…the Fifth Circuit issued an uncommon ruling against the state, rejecting arguments from the Texas Education Agency—the suit’s lead defendant—that claimed that requiring booksellers to rate books was a mere administrative task. “This process is highly discretionary and is neither precise nor certain,” the court’s opinion read. “The statute requires vendors to undertake contextual analyses, weighing and balancing many factors to determine a rating for each book,” a process the opinion said was “anything but the mere disclosure of factual information.”
The plaintiffs had several issues with the law—tasking short-staffed booksellers with reading every single book any customer wanted to order would be an impossible task, for instance—but, according to Blue Willow owner Valerie Koehler, the real sticking point was being required by law to offer opinions on the contents of the books she sold. “I think common sense has prevailed,” she told Texas Monthly. “It’s not really up to the vendor to rate these books, where they’re compelling us to rate a book that they could then say, ‘No, that’s not a good rating.’ They were making us take a stand, and then were still in charge of whether our standards were right or not.”
The future of the law is still undecided—representatives from the office of the attorney general and the Texas Education Agency did not return requests for interviews—but the state would face an uphill battle with the Supreme Court after losing at the typically reliable Fifth Circuit. Koehler is accordingly optimistic—and reflective—about the struggle.
“We’ve never said, ‘We’re not going to carry that book because we don’t believe in it.’ We’ll carry it on our shelves if we think someone is going to come in and ask for it. That’s what we do as a business,” she said. “I didn’t take a stand against Greg Abbott; I took a stand as a business, for common sense, and my First Amendment rights as a bookseller.”
As you know, Governor Abbott of Texas placed the Texas National Guard in control of the international border which is the Rio Grande River, where immigrants have been wading or swimming across. The Texas Guard refused to allow the U.S. Border Patrol to enter the section they control near Eagle Pass, Texas. Recently a woman and her two small children drowned in the section patrolled by the state.
The Biden administration sued the state to recognize the supremacy of federal law. The federal district court agreed with the feds. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the state. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 for the federal government.
Now Governor Abbott says he will ignore the Supreme Court because the state is facing an “invasion.”
The PBS Newshour invited a notable constitutional lawyer, Stephen Vladeck of the University of Texas, to discuss the issues.
I’m not a lawyer but it seems to me that the issue of states’ rights was settled in 1865.
Meanwhile, Governor Abbott is scoring lots of points for defying the federal government and the Supreme Court. Texas has a small but loud minority that wants to secede from the U.S.
Abbott wants a confrontation with the federal government. Biden will have to stand up to Abbott’s grandstanding while taking a strong position on securing the border.
The Houston Chronicle reported on a study that showed one of the consequences of a state law that does not permit women who are the victims of rape or incest to obtain an abortion. In addition, teen births rose for the first time in 15 years.
That’s the highest figure among the 14 states with total abortion bans, with Texas having the largest population, according to the study.
“Survivors who need abortion care should not have their reproductive autonomy further undermined by state policy,” said one of the authors, Dr. Kari White, of the Texas-based Resound Research for Reproductive Health…
Following the June 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, the researchers estimated there were 519,981 rapes associated with 64,565 pregnancies during the four to 18 months after states implemented total abortion bans. Of those pregnancies, an estimated 5,586 occurred in states with exceptions for rape and 58,979 in states with no exceptions.
Of the five states with rape exceptions, strict gestational limits and requirements to report the rape to law enforcement make it harder for most survivors to qualify, the study said. There were 10 or fewer legal abortions per month in the five states with rape exceptions, the study said, indicating that survivors with access to abortion care still cannot receive it in their home state…
Behind Texas, the states with the highest totals were Missouri (5,825), Tennessee (4,990), Arkansas (4,660), Oklahoma (4,530), Louisiana (4,290) and Alabama (4,130).
As a woman and a mother, I cannot understand a law requiring a woman to bear her rapist’s baby. The child would be a daily reminder of a terrible act of violence. I know what my decision would be. Other women may feel differently. Each woman in that situation should be allowed to decide what to do.
Thom Hartmann is at his best in this column. He writes about the current GOP obsession with a “Christian America” and compares it to what the Founding Fathers wrote about the role of religion in their new nation. Added to the current pandering is the fact that we now have a Supreme Court majority of six-three that elevates “religious freedom” above the Constitutional prohibition of “establishment” of religion. That means trouble for those of us who do not want to live in a theocracy.
He writes:
Monday, in addition to being Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, was National Religious Freedom Day. But what does that mean, and for whom? What would the “Christian America” that Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson are calling for look like?
When I was a kid, my parents and our pastor taught me that Jesus specifically, and religion more generally, was all about peace, love, and people caring for each other. That’s what’s explicitly at the core of Jesus’ most famous and clear teachings at the Sermon On The Mount and in the Parable of the Goats and Sheep.
But the Republican Party, thirsting for more voters in the 1980 Reagan vs Carter election, realized that Southern Baptists had helped give the White House to Carter in 1976 (he’s a Southern Baptist). If they could just peel those voters away from Carter and the Democratic Party, they believed they could win big.
The issue the Reagan campaign decided to use to bring religious voters to Republicans in that election was abortion, a topic Jesus never discussed.
Up until that election, both former Governor Reagan and former CIA Director Bush had been open supporters of a woman’s right to choose; in the run-up to the primaries Reagan became an unabashed foe of abortion, and George H.W. Bush changed his position on the issue when he joined the ticket in 1980.The legacy of those decisions has brought us Trump, Qanon, and badly damaged large parts of what’s left of Christianity in America (church attendance is collapsing). It’s turned both religion and politics into armed camps. At the founding of our Republic, if there was any one topic that the Framers of the Constitution were mostly in agreement about, it was the importance of keeping religion separate from government.
More recently, even uber-Catholic Antonin Scalia wrote, in the 1990 Employment v Smith case rejecting Native Americans’ petition to overrule federal regulations and legally use peyote (an outlawed substance) for religious purposes:
“The rule respondents favor would open the prospect of constitutionally required religious exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind ranging from compulsory military service to the payment of taxes; to health and safety regulation such as manslaughter and child neglect laws, compulsory vaccination laws, drug laws, and traffic laws; to social welfare legislation such as minimum wage laws, child labor laws, animal cruelty laws, environmental protection laws, and laws providing for equality of opportunity for the races. The First Amendment’s protection of religious liberty does not require this. …
“To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”
Don’t tell today’s Republicans that’s a bad thing, though: Scalia’s list is a good summary of many of the realms they’re currently targeting. The six Catholic extremist Republicans on the Court appear anxious to overturn any final semblance of secular primacy in law, using religion as their excuse.
It’s gotten so absurd and frankly obscene that a reporter recently spoke with a woman at a Trump rally sporting a crucifix and a tee-shirt that said “Hang Joe Biden For Treason”; she was essentially arguing that Jesus would be all in favor of watching Biden’s execution.
Monday was Religious Freedom Day because it commemorated the publication of Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. That early publication (he was 33) not only asserted that all citizens should be free to practice whatever religion they wanted but, more importantly, that nobody should be persecuted for holding either a religious belief or no religious belief.
Jefferson thought it was more important than his having been a two-term president: when he wrote his own epitaph, he only included his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, his founding America’s first free university (University of Virginia), and his Statute for Religious Freedom.
Jefferson and Madison had a philosophical debate over which would be more dangerous: a religious individual who wants to bring religion into government like Christian nationalist Mike Johnson, or the government endorsing or subsidizing any particular religious group or belief like Trump is promising.
Jefferson (a Deist) was worried about religious leaders (a letter of his is *footnoted below) corrupting government; Madison (a Christian) was more worried about government corrupting his beloved religion.
For example, on February 21, 1811, President Madison vetoed a bill passed by Congress that authorized government payments to a church in Washington, DC to help the poor. Faith-based initiatives were a clear violation, Madison believed, of the doctrine of separation of church and state, and could lead to a dangerous transfer of both money and political power to religious leaders.
In Madison’s mind, caring for the poor was a public and civic duty — a function of government — and must not be allowed to become a hole through which churches could reach and seize political power or the taxpayer’s purse.
Funding a church to provide for the poor would establish a “legal agency” — a legal precedent — that would break down the walls of separation the Founders had put between church and state to protect Americans from religious zealots gaining political power.
Thus, Madison said in his veto message to Congress, he was striking down the proposed law:
“Because the bill vests and said incorporated church an also authority to provide for the support of the poor, and the education of poor children of the same;…” which, Madison said, “would be a precedent for giving to religious societies, as such, a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty.”
James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, flatly rejected government supporting religion in any way whatsoever, noting in a July 10, 1822 letter to Edward Livingston:
“We are teaching the world the great truth, that Governments do better without kings and nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson: the Religion flourishes in greater purity without, than with the aid of Government.”
He added in that same letter:
“I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.”
Now we see that both were right, although Madison probably had the edge: when the GOP offered evangelicals political power and big money in 1980, it so corrupted many conservative Christian churches that they’ve today put Trump above Jesus.
It’s gotten so bad that fully a third of evangelicals polled said they supported violence to advance political goals, which is quite literally the opposite of Jesus’ telling the Pharisees:
“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
Not to mention his extensive preaching about nonviolence. He was MLK’s role model, for G-d’s sake.
Instead, Trump’s followers are busily sharing memes of him as their savior, while Speaker Johnson and his fellow travelers on the Supreme Court are working as hard as they can to open the doors (and money) of government to religious leaders.
Religion has a lot to offer people and often fulfills a basic need to stand in awe of creation, to feel at one with everything and everyone. Every culture all the way back to the Neanderthals have engaged in religious rituals, particularly around funerals: no tribe or group has ever been found that entirely lacked what could be described as religious rituals.
But, as our founders pointed out, religion should be separated from government as far as possible. Jefferson’s Virginia Statute says it explicitly:
“No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”
Instead, Republicans are exploiting that religious urge built into us humans to cynically pander for the votes of those people who’ve put religion at the center of their lives.
They’re reinventing America as a country where religion dictates women’s healthcare, specifies who can marry whom, and destroys the lives of people who weren’t born heterosexual.
They’re promoting movies/vids portraying Trump as the incarnation of Jesus, a bizarre sort of Second Coming worthy of North Korean propaganda.
They’re using religion as an excuse for bigotry, a rationale for government tax subsidies of churches that promote Republicans from the pulpit, and a weapon to wield against those they condemn as being insufficiently pious.
In the process, they’re harming both religion and our government.
In a decision that was a happy surprise, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Biden administration’s view that federal law controls international borders, not state law.
The vote was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett voting with the three liberal justices.
Governor Greg Abbott ordered that razor wire and buoys be strung across the Rio Grand at locations where migrants were crossing from Mexico to Texas. The U.S. Botder Patrol was blocked by the Texas National Guard, which took control of policing the border. Three migrants, a woman and her two young children, drowned while the Texas National Guard watched and prevented the Border Patrol from rendering assistance.
The Biden administration sued the state of Texas, asserting the primacy of federal law. The federal district court ruled in favor of the federal government. Texas appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative in the nation, which ruled in favor of Texas. Many legal scholars thought that ruling was bizarre.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the federal government and against Texas, meaning that the U.S. Border Patrol will resume their duties. This decision is a knock on the secessionist inclinations of far-right firebrand Greg Abbott and the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
This decision knocked down the claim that state law could override federal law and that a state on the international border could take control.
What’s truly shocking is that four justices were willing to give states the authority to overrule federal law. Shades of 1860!
No matter how many times he is caught lying, no matter how many top-secret documents he squirreled away, no matter how lavishly he praises dictators, no matter how many porn stars he has partied with, no matter how many millions he took from foreign governments during his term, no matter how many criminal counts he faces, no matter how many times he was indicted, the base of the GOP loves him.
Trump owns the Republican Party. It used to be the party of “family values,” but that pretense has been tossed aside. Trump, a thrive-married philanderer, has never talked about family values.
INDIANOLA, Iowa — They lined up for hours, some of them, in the minus-38-degree wind chill to see their candidate. It was the only rally Donald Trump was giving in the state in the TV days before Monday’s caucuses, so for the MAGA faithful, this was the golden ticket.
For the lucky 500 Trump followers admitted to the event space, the Trump campaign played a video reminding voters that Trump had already come in first place in the God primary.
“And on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump,” the narrator proclaimed.
“God said, ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight. … So God made Trump.” “‘I need somebody with arms strong enough to rassle the deep state and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild.’ … So God gave us Trump.”
And then it came to pass, a few minutes later, that this midwife-turned-prophet took the stage in the ballroom, and he spake thus to his flock:
“We’ve got a crooked country,” run by “stupid people,” “corrupt,” “incompetent,” “the worst.” Trump, in the gospel according to Trump, was the victim of “hoaxes,” “witch hunts,” “lies,” “fake indictments,” “fake trials,” judges who “are animals,” a “rigged election,” “rigged indictments,” and a “rigged Department of Justice where we have radical left, bad people, lunatics.”
The nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., “is a rat-infested, graffiti-infested shithole,” he said, with swastikas all over the national monuments.
His opponents, the prophet Trump continued, are “Marxists,” “communists,” “fascists,” “liars, cheaters, thugs, perverts, frauds, crooks, freaks, creeps,” “warmongers” and “globalists.” Immigrants are like a “vicious snake,” whose “bite is poisonous,” he told them, and there is an “invasion” at the border by “terrorists,” “jailbirds” and “drug lords.”
“Our country is dying,” he informed them. And, by the way, “You’re very close to World War III.” Have a nice day!
It was, in short, a slightly updated version of the rage, paranoia, victimhood, lies and demonization that propelled Trump’s popularity over the past eight years. Yet there was something else Trump said in his appearance here at Simpson College, south of Des Moines, that, I’m sorry to say, seems reasonably accurate.
“MAGA is taking over,” he told his chilled but enraptured supporters. “On the fake news, they say MAGA represents 44 percent of the Republicans. No, no. MAGA represents 95 percent of the Republican Party.”
His numbers might be off, but the observation is true. Iowa’s Republican presidential caucuses Monday night were an overwhelming triumph for Trump, who in early results was more than 30 points ahead of his nearest competitor and getting more votes than the rest of the field combined. The voters had shown that there essentially is no Republican other than a MAGA Republican…
Nikki Haley points out that she polls better against Biden than the others, and it’s true. Were she the nominee, Republicans would likely win the presidency in a landslide. But this Republican electorate wants something different.
They want a guy who talks about being a “dictator” on day one, echoes Hitler in his rhetoric about ethnic minorities, demands absolute immunity from legal liability and threatens “bedlam” if he’s prosecuted.
They want a guy who, after all these years, still derides “Barack Hussein Obama” and “Pocahontas” Elizabeth Warren, as he did in Indianola on Sunday. They want a guy who threatens, as president, to “direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical, out-of-control prosecutor because of their illegal, racist … enforcement of the law.”
And they want a man who promises: “We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmonger … We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that truly hates our country. We will rout the fake news media. And we will evict Crooked Joe Biden from the White House.” The crowd, in their MAGA caps and Trump 47 jerseys, cheered their candidate and broke into spontaneous chants of “Trump!” and “USA!”
Let there be no more excuses made that Republican voters haven’t been given an alternative. They had a choice — and they chose Trump.
Iowa is an atypical state. It is overwhelmingly white and has a large number of evangelicals. Let’s see how other states vote.
Despite his paranoia, despite his character—or because of them— Trump swept 51% of the vote in Iowa.
However. CBS News reported that less than 15% of registered Republicans turned out in the bitter cold to cast a vote.
Thanks to blogger Billy Townsend, I learned about the Florida Center for Government Accountability and its publication, The Florida Trident. This organization shines a bright light on government corruption. I am sending a donation to encourage their great work.
Just when Florida’s forces of gross grift seem to enjoy total impunity, the Florida Center for Government Accountability takes down the Zieglers, beats DeSantis in court, and becomes a new sheriff.
FCGA uncovered the scandalous Ziegler family threesome, which led to Christian Ziegler being forced out as state chair of the GOP and caused some embarrassing moments for his wife Bridget, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty and an outspoken critic of gays.
FCGA recently posted about the state’s deceptive marketing to women who search for abortion providers on the Internet. If they choose an “abortion center” funded by the state, they will fall into the clutches of anti-abortion zealots, likely evangelicals, who will try to persuade them not to have an abortion.
An image from a state-funded anti-abortion center website.
When Abby learned she was pregnant, the first thing she did was look online for support. As a college student in a small town in northwest Florida, she thought the Internet was her best hope to find help for her unplanned pregnancy with a boyfriend who had become abusive.
Sifting through Google’s search results, she stumbled on an online-chat providing support for people in need of abortion care. The chat operator stressed the importance of a pregnancy test and referred her to a nearby pregnancy center in Deland called the Grace House.
The center’s website welcomed people like Abby who didn’t have insurance and asked to remain anonymous due to safety concerns. She scheduled a visit for the following day – a day she said she’ll never forget.
The horrific visit ended with Abby sobbing as center employees systematically pressured her to continue her pregnancy, prayed over her belly, and promised her free baby care products if she would come back for more “counseling.”
“I deserved legitimate medical care and compassion,” said Abby. “But I know in that room, they didn’t see me or my future. They just saw a positive pregnancy test.”
The staffers at Grace House were not there to help her receive abortion care, but instead to convince her and all others who enter the center for care to complete their pregnancy and be saved by Christianity in the process.
“I was fooled by this facility in a moment of vulnerability and desperation and trusting the wrong people,” Abby said.
The same “wrong people” are funded by the state’s Florida Pregnancy Support Services Program, which provides taxpayers’ money to more than 100 anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs)” around the state. The stated goal of the program is to convince clients to carry their pregnancies to term rather than having abortions.
As previously reported in an ongoing Florida Trident investigative series, the centers, including Grace House, are Christian-based organizations and often identify themselves as “ministries” and “missions.” Several legal experts have said the program runs afoul of the U.S. and Florida constitutions, the latter of which expressly forbids the state from aiding religious organizations.
Despite its inherent problems, the program is now bursting at the seams in Florida. Its annual budget has ballooned from $4 million to $25 million a year, an increase written into the controversial six-week abortion ban legislation signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in April.
Kurt Filla is leading the state’s anti-abortion ad campaign.
Included in that funding explosion is a quadrupling of the program’s advertising budget to nearly $1 million a year, according to state records, paid out via the Florida Pregnancy Care Network, the non-profit tasked with administering the program for the state.
Kurt Filla, owner of the Michigan-based company, Filla Life Media, snared the state-funded advertising contract. Filla, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, is an outspoken conspiracy theorist who has backed false QAnon and vaccine tropes on the Internet and has written that the 2020 election was stolen, that God sends him angels and he’s heard the devil talk in his head, and that “global elites” are secretly trying to make people “impotent and immobile.”
Jenifer McKenna, an activist with the Reproductive Health Accountability Fund at Hopewell, said the steep funding hike and hiring of ideologically radical companies like Filla Life are part of a trend in “abortion-hostile” states like Florida to divert tax dollars to CPCs and “ramp up targeted digital marketing to track down pregnant people, talk them out of abortion, and collect their sensitive data.”
“Researchers are calling the post-Roe landscape an ‘abortion infodemic’ with CPCs playing a leading role,” said McKenna, adding that the centers use “extensive digital strategies to intercept pregnant people seeking care, sow confusion, spread disinformation and obstruct access.”
After an initial visit, which at some clinics includes an ultrasound where individual center staffers pray for the fetus, clients are urged to return for “counseling” and parenting classes. In fact, while the state bills the centers as health care providers, a whopping 87.5% of program reimbursements go for counseling and classes, a Trident analysis of state records found. A significant portion of the new $20 million in annual spending will fund a doubling of the amount the state reimburses the centers for counseling from $75 an hour to $150 an hour, state records show.
To put the $150 hourly rate in perspective, the state reimburses registered nurses – who actually have formalized education and training for the critical work they do – only $32.07 per home health care visit, according to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration. Home health aides, who lack the RN’s credentials, are reimbursed a scant $18.04 per visit by the state.
When told of that increase, Amy Weintraub, who serves as reproductive rights director for the non-profit Progress Florida, called it “atrocious.” She noted that the “counselors” at the centers have no training or education requirements and are often hired based largely on their Christian faith.
“The fact that [state-funded pregnancy centers] are even allowed to use the word ‘counselor’ is such an affront because … they are not trained counselors,” said Weintraub.
That’s something Abby said she found out the hard way.
“Oh, She’s Abortion-Minded”
A random online search for abortion in Fort Lauderdale turns up a website for the Hope Women’s Centers, which received $100,000 in state funding last year. Its website promises “free abortion information” and “consultations on abortion pills, surgical abortion procedures, and emergency contraceptives.”
Yet like all other state-funded pregnancy crisis centers, Hope, which is strongly aligned with the Rio Vista Church, has two goals: to dissuade clients from having an abortion and to try to save their souls. None of that is mentioned in the online material.
It was the same in Abby’s case when she went to Grace House, which recently changed its name to Coastal Choices Women’s Clinic, a moniker that belies the fact that it vehemently opposes choice and isn’t a bona fide health clinic. The Trident left a detailed message for comment with a receptionist at Coastal; a promised return call was not received prior to publication.
“There is no Planned Parenthood in my county, so I thought it was a smaller version of it,” said Abby. “And they said if you were considering abortion to come on in, so I felt that was an invitation.”
Once inside, she was given a form to fill out with questions about her faith, her intimate relationships, even what her college grades looked like. It was the first clue she was inside a Christian ministry instead of a bona fide health clinic.
“That gave me a little bit of a pause,” Abby said. “But it wasn’t until the actual counseling session that I deeply regretted walking in the doors.”
She’d written in the form that she wanted an abortion.
“I watched a group of maybe three staff or volunteers crowd around my paper,” she said. “And I hear them say something to the effect of, ‘Oh, she’s abortion-minded, I’ll take her.’”
In the counseling session that followed, which she attended with her partner, Abby took a pregnancy test that was kept hidden while staff pressed her for 40 minutes about her personal life. She said the staffers told her she was in no position to make the decision about an abortion for herself.
When her partner was out of the room, Abby confided that she was in an abusive relationship. She said the counselor advised her to stay with her partner because the baby would give her purpose and help him step up as a man, and urged him, when Abby was outside the room, to stop her from getting an abortion because the procedure could kill her.
After the test came back positive, Abby was handed her due date and a small replica of a fetus. A staffer asked her what she might name the baby. Distraught, Abby began sobbing.
“There was so much talking over me when I was clearly having a breakdown,” Abby recalled. “[One staffer] starts praying over my stomach, she’s touching my stomach the whole time, and saying that I can start right away taking their parenting classes to earn baby bucks for their boutique to get baby clothes. And all the while I’m just so terrified.”
The experience was a far cry from the online promises, a contrast Weintraub said is common. The most fundamental deception in the advertising is the centers’ posing as health clinics when they don’t actually offer comprehensive reproductive health care services, she said.
“They strip their web sites of anti-abortion lingo so that the intended victims will not realize that the place they are visiting is an anti-abortion center,” said Weintraub. “All kinds of tricky language is used to cloak their true intention.”
Now Filla Life Media, under the leadership of its extremist owner, is set to receive $1 million a year from Florida taxpayers for its marketing prowess.
Tax-Payer Funded Anti-Abortion Marketing Agencies
Filla Life Media is a member of a national network called the Pro-Life Marketing Ethics Council made up of “unified Christ-centered and holistically pro-life” companies dedicated to promoting marketing strategies “grounded in biblical principles and informed by cutting-edge best practices.”
A key strategy of the Florida program is to boost its anti-abortion clinics in Google search results and place ads on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. State documents show the aim of the campaign is to “generate leads and inquiries” from pregnant people and that it uses “marketing strategies … with the goal of enabling her to carry the pregnancy to term and choose parenting or adoption.”
The new Filla Life marketing campaign is set to be the most aggressive to date, targeting women aged between 18 and 44 years old across Florida. Many of the ads specifically target teens and the uninsured.
The campaign will employ the latest in tracking technology and will leverage behavioral data—like what people are or are not doing in an app, on a website, or how they interact with campaigns—to personalize the message.
FPCN ads that appear at the top of Google searches for “unplanned pregnancy” or “pregnancy test” promise “Compassionate Counseling,” “Judgement-Free Pregnancy Support” and ”Pregnancy Pill Help.” Of 134 Google ads purchased this year by marketing companies on behalf of the state program reviewed by the Trident, only three explicitly warned the centers don’t provide abortions.
While the new ad campaign is super-charged, it’s nothing new. For years, Floridians’ tax dollars have gone to anti-abortion marketing agencies with little to no transparency. Before Filla Life, an Illinois-based company called Caledon, and its subdivision Choose Life Marketing, held the advertising contract.
The digital tactics promoted by Choose Life, alongside other anti-abortion marketing agencies, sparked a congressional investigation in 2022 that cited a number of the company’s tactics, including geofencing strategies, which use sensitive data from abortion seekers to facilitate government surveillance, harassment, intimidation and even violence. The company also featured prominently in a report issued by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which exposed the deceptive tactics of several anti-abortion marketing agencies.
Those marketing strategies also involved so-called “right-brain research” peddled by the Vitae Foundation, an anti-abortion research organization. Vitae uses extensive interviews with previously pregnant people involving repetition and relaxation techniques to “access the emotional mind and uncover deeply seated emotional needs and barriers,” according to its promotional materials.
“By studying the right side of the brain, which controls the emotional, intuitive and creative aspects of the person, Vitae was able to focus on women’s hidden, emotional response to pregnancy, abortion and motherhood,” the foundation explained in a report.
A key finding of the foundation is that “women carry an unwanted pregnancy to term when guilt wins out over shame,” a concept used by pro-life marketing agencies to craft their messaging to “abortion-minded women.”
To continue reading the article, open the link. It’s shameful that the state of Florida spends millions to tell women that they should not get an abortion, no matter how much they want one.
Ron DeSantis likes to boast about “freedom” in Florida, but apparently you are not free unless you agree with him.
Teachers of Black history are not free to teach the truth. Librarians are not free to use their professional judgment about books. Gays and trans kids are not free to live their lives. Drag queens are not free to perform their acts.
Women in Florida are not free to make major decisions about their own lives.
Pro-choice groups in Florida have gathered enough signatures to put a referendum on the ballot in November. But the hyper-conservative state Supreme Court must give its approval before the referendum can go forward. There have already been suggestions that the measure may be stricken because it says abortion should be legal until the fetus reaches “viability,” and critics say that the term is vague. Keep watching.
Gregg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, is winning the competition among red-state governors to prove that he is the meanest of all. He wants to secure the border but he won’t work with the Biden administration to do it. Now, as a result of his orders, three migrants drowned. Does he have blood on his hands? I wonder if he laughed when he heard about it.
WASHINGTON — Three migrants — a woman and two children — drowned in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass Friday night after Texas National Guard soldiers blocked Border Patrol agents from reaching them, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar said Saturday.
State officials had seized a 2.5-mile stretch of the border earlier this week, an unprecedented state takeover that the Department of Justice says prevents Border Patrol agents from reaching even migrants in need of emergency assistance.
Cuellar said Border Patrol learned Friday night of a group of six migrants in distress as they were trying to cross the Rio Grande near the area. Border Patrol attempted to contact Texas National Guard and Department of Public Safety officials to alert them by phone, but were unable to reach them. They then alerted soldiers at the entrance of a public park that the state had fenced off and prevented federal authorities from entering.
“The Texas Military Department and the Texas National Guard did not grant access to Border Patrol agents to save the migrants,” Cuellar wrote on social media. “This is a tragedy and the state bears responsibility.”
The Texas Military Division and Department of Public Safety did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday. Neither did Gov. Greg Abbott’s office. The Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection also did not respond to a request for comment.
Cuellar said the Texas National Guard denied Border Patrol entrance, “even in the event of an emergency,” and said they would send state soldiers to investigate. Three bodies were recovered Saturday morning by Mexican authorities, Cuellar said.
Cuellar, who does not represent Eagle Pass, is a Laredo Democrat who has represented a nearby border district for two decades. He is the top Democrat on a House subcommittee overseeing funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes Border Patrol.
Open the link to read more.
The Houston Chronicle editorial board thought that Abbott’s behavior was cruel and callous. The editorial board blamed Congress for failing to enact legislation to fix a broken immigration system. No one wants an open border. Abbott was recently interviewed on a rightwing talk show by Dana Loesch, former spokesperson for the NRA, and he boasted that he was doing everything to stop the immigrants except murdering them.
The editorial began:
“The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”
– Texas Gov. Greg Abbott
That’s our governor talking, folks. Yessir, he’s one tough son of a gun. Or, at least, he sounds like one. We would suggest, though, that he’s not tough at all. We would suggest that he’s a coward, not to mention an ongoing embarrassment to this state.
Despite his big talk, it is a small man who leaches power and satisfaction from the mistreatment and mockery of the vulnerable. It is a small man who refuses to consider the dangerousness of his tough talk and his callous policies. While clumsily evoking the murder of migrants could incite another El Paso massacre, his rogue, unrelenting policing of the border is endangering lives.
Indeed, on Saturday, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, announcedthat the bodies of three migrants — a woman and two children — were found floating in the Rio Grande near an Eagle Pass park that Texas DPS troopers have seized. Cuellar said Texas authorities wouldn’t grant access to U.S. Border Patrol agents trying to respond to migrants in distress and agreed only to send a soldier to assess the situation.
“This is a tragedy, and the state bears responsibility,” Cuellar said in a statement.
If Abbott fears the criminal penalty for shooting migrants, does he fear any kind of consequences for letting them drown?…
Abbott’s intemperate remarks about guns and shooting people are merely of a piece with his immigration stunts – busing migrants to northern cities, stringing razor wire along the Rio Grande, arresting asylum seekers. The governor is afraid to dig in and look for real solutions to a complex problem — solutions that might mean collaborating with political opponents. When we made a similar criticism of Abbott in a recent editorial, the governor noted on X that we neglected to mention the letter he had hand-delivered to President Biden a year ago in El Paso.
That letter, antagonistic in tone and political in motive, demanded Biden get busy on border wall construction and make pandemic-era immigration policies permanent long after the pandemic ended. It wasn’t about solving anything. It was the same performative politics we’ve come to expect from a self-aggrandizing politician who’s not Texas-tough enough to do what’s right. Or even, at times, what’s human.
Fabiola Santiago is a columnist for the Miami Herald who is expert at skewering Ron DeSantis and his hateful policies. When he tried to take a victory lap during the Republican debates, she called him out. Kids are not better off in Florida, she writes, but racists and homophobes are. It turns out that DeSantis’s war against gays, Black history, and drag queens was not enough to sustain his campaign.
Santiago wrote:
Only in Gov. Ron DeSantis’ version of Fantasyland are kids in Florida “better off” under his watch.
The presidential job-seeker’s assertion, during Wednesday’s Iowa debate with Nikki Haley, that such is the state of childhood in Florida would be laughable — Exhibit No. 1, the man is trying to ruin happy-for-all Disney World — if his anti-science children’s healthcare policiesweren’t dangerous.
Or, his lie might have played out as the self-deprecating joke of a desperate, losing candidate — if DeSantis had kept his homophobia, transphobia, and discomfort with the legacy of racism in American history, where those sordid feelings belong, in the privacy of his home and wooden heart.
But DeSantis made his fears and prejudices against people who aren’t white, straight and ultra Christian-conservative the public’s business in Florida. And what he has unleashed isn’t child-friendly at all.
He used his power to get bills passed through the lily-livered Florida Legislature, signing into law medical practices that go against the advice of respected child healthcare experts like the American Academy of Pediatrics.
This means doctors and psychiatrists in Florida are limited by law on what they can do to address our children’s gender issues, and subject to felony penalties if they deviate from GOP wishes. Doctors also have their hands tied treating mothers facing an unwanted pregnancy discovered after six weeks, which also adversely affects entire families.
And, because the anti-vaxxer governor is a friend of debunked science and quack medical opinions, he has not only campaigned against children (and adults) getting the COVID vaccine, but he’s made it difficult for Florida parents to access boosters.
Under his mandate, schools are no longer safe zones for gay and trans children.
Before DeSantis, the intersection of healthcare, identity and lifestyle was a matter between parents and their doctors. Decisions about approach and care were based on individual cases and made as a family unit.
Now, healthcare and education are in the hands of Republican ideologues — social engineers who constantly feed voters misinformation and outright lies, feeding people’s lowest human instincts to shun the reality and preferences of others.
In schools, children unable to speak to their parents about conflicting identity issues, often were able to confide in a teacher, who in consultation with supervisors, would decide if it warranted parental intervention, or if the disclosure might put the child’s life in danger from family.
No more.
Teachers can be sued, fined, and fired if they allow gender identity discussions, pushing some excellent teachers to leave Florida or the profession, worsening a teacher shortage. This isn’t good for anyone, but least of all for children.
Adults have the power of choice — and many Floridians are exercising it by moving with their trans or gay children out of state, driven by the anti-LGBTQ laws, like former Heat star Dwayne Wade, whose teenage daughter Zaya came out as transgender in 2020.
Parents aren’t going to run the risk of the state taking transgender minors away from their families for receiving gender-affirming care. Nor will they stand for the atmosphere of hate and disrespect DeSantis’ constant harangues and policies have generated.
Unfortunately, not all children have parents with the financial wherewithal to move them to a more sane and accepting state — and remain stuck in DeSantis World suffering his pathology, especially in schools, where they’re no longer free to be themselves.
Nor to read literature that reflects their reality. Nor to play sports in the team where they feel they belong.
No, children are definitely not better off in Florida, where the education system is under-performing, according to national assessments. DeSantis’ solution: Get rid of the tests and dissuade kids from going to college.
With no accountability and ways to measure, he can claim success. With kids skipping higher education, his wealthy donors can access cheaper labor.
The governor’s culture wars and their harmful effect, however, are catching up to him.
In the process of trying to convince Republican voters that he and his “Florida Blueprint” are the alternative to disgraced Donald Trump, DeSantis recast his record — the vengeful attack on Disney World and his ruthless approach to LGBTQ and transgender children — to paint a pretty picture depicting major successes.
Oh, and what a macho man he was to take on Disney!
“We took on Disney and we defeated that and we won that fight and our kids kids are better off now,” DeSantis said.
A big lie that he kept repeating. Disney continues to celebrate Pride Month with “Gay Days,” and in 2023 released its Disney Pride Collection of clothing and accessories….
His neatly-packaged arguments, an attempt to camouflage what’s clearly discrimination, fear of difference and assaults on free speech, are coming undone.
Voters do have the last word — and, apparently, no matter how much the governor travels the nation, or perhaps because they’re getting to know him — polls show voters just don’t pick him.
Even in Florida, where DeSantis thinks he’s king, voters prefer 91-count, criminally-charged Donald Trump.
Turns out the people better off in Florida are possibly a minority: homophobic, racist adults.
You might well wonder, as I did, why Republicans in Congress were conducting hearings about anti-Semitism in our nation’s elite private universities. That is normally the job of the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education. Historically and recently, Republicans have not been known as a party that worries overmuch about anti-Semitism or other forms of bigotry.
As a matter of fact, as this article in The Hill shows, the Republicans’ real concern is to stamp out DEI programs (diversity, equity, and inclusion) in higher education. Two of the three elite university presidents who were grilled by Rep. Elise Stefanik resigned, and she crowed about her victory. The conservative media treated Harvard University President Claudine Gay as an unqualified diversity hire. Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania also resigned after the hearing.
From the article:
Republicans say their departures are just the beginning of needed reforms at the schools.
“This is only among the very first steps on a very long road to recovering or returning to higher education its true and original purposes, which is truth-seeking,” said Jay Greene, senior research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation.
Conservatives cheered the departures, which came after the two, as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sally Kornbluth, faced questions on campus antisemitism before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Neither Elise Stefanik nor Jay Greene has shown interest in anti-Semitism in the past, to my knowledge. Neither issued statements to denounce the young fascists who marched with tiki torches in Charlottesville and chanted “The Jews will not replace us.” If they reacted to the slaughter of Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, I am not aware of it.
An even bigger joke is for anyone at the Heritage Foundation to celebrate “truth-seeking,” when Heritage oversaw planning for the next term of Donald Trump, who has a well-documented record of telling thousands of lies. Heritage Foundation, clean your own house. Before you lecture others about “truth-seeking,” look in the mirror.
“Two down. One to go,” tweeted committee member Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.). “Accountability is coming.”
“The long overdue forced resignations of former Presidents Claudine Gay and Liz Magill are just the beginning of the tectonic consequences from their historic morally bankrupt testimony to my questions,” Stefanik added in a statement to The Hill, mentioning an official probe into the schools that the panel has announced.
“The investigation will address all aspects of a fundamentally broken and corrupt higher education system — antisemitism on campus, taxpayer funded aid, foreign aid, DEI, accreditation, academic integrity, and governance,” she said, using an acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion programs…
But their biggest target recently has been DEI programs, making the case that they have been more harmful than helpful to students…
Greene said he is hopeful “additional people are going to have to be removed, both leaders of universities and their underlings, because they’re also significant actors in this. It’s not just at the top, but it’s kind of throughout these institutions.”
He also specifically called for the dismantling of DEI efforts on campus and disciplines such as gender studies, another popular GOP target.
Such efforts have been in motion long before the shake-ups at UPenn and Harvard.
In Texas, a law banning diversity programs at public universities took effect in the new year. And last year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) also signed a bill to defund DEI programs at public universities. …
A tracker by the Chronicle of Higher Education last year found 40 bills had been introduced in states across the country to try to restrict DEI programs, diversity statements and mandatory diversity training at schools.
It’s disgusting to see a feigned concern about anti-Semitism used as a stalking horse to dismantle DEI programs and as a pretext for inserting Big government into the policy making process in private higher education.
As long as Republicans control either House of Congress, we can anticipate the rise of a new McCarthyism, purging the curriculum and professors.
Diane Ravitch's blog 