There have been stories in the press recently suggesting that the culture war issues are fading away. Such stories are premature.

Jason Garcia is an investigative reporter in Florida who keeps watch over the daily corruption in politics in his blog “Seeking Rents.” In this post, he tracks the bills that were passed. If you think the Republican majority is moderating its ideology, read this.

Garcia writes:

Two weeks into this year’s session of the Florida Legislature, one of the Big Business lobby’s top priorities seemed to be in trouble.

Republican leaders in the Florida House of Representatives were muscling a bill through their chamber that would, among other things, stop cities and counties across the state from enforcing local laws that require government contractors to pay higher wages or businesses with outdoor workers to follow heat-safety rules.

But the legislation — House Bill 433, which records show was written at least partly by lobbyists for the Florida Chamber of Commerce— faced a more difficult path forward in the Florida Senate.

To have any hope of passing, the Senate version of the bill first had to clear the chamber’s Commerce and Tourism Committee, where Republicans held a slim, 4-2 majority. And one of the Republican members was Sen. Ana Maria Rodriguez of Miami, where more than 28,000 workers were facing potential pay cuts under the bill. Rodriguez is also one of four Republican senators in Tallahassee elected to swing districts with help of spoiler-candidate schemesorchestrated by GOP political strategists using Big Business money.

Even if Senate Bill 1492 somehow survived that stop, it would then have to get through the Senate’s Community Affairs Committee. And the chairperson of that committee — the person who, at least ostensibly, decides which bills to put on the agenda and which to let die without a hearing — was Sen. Alexis Calatayud, another Republican from Miami sitting in a possible tossup seat.

So the Senate sponsor — Sen. Jay Trumbull (R-Panama City) — offered a compromise. He agreed to remove the part of his bill that would have wiped out living wage laws in places like Miami. The scaled-back version of the bill would only stop communities from establishing their own heat-protection rules, which wasn’t something that any city or county had done yet (though Miami has been considering one).

“I felt that for our purposes— in this committee, on this particular bill, today — that it would be better just to have us just talk about the heat issues in the bill,” Trumbull told the committee that day.

The compromise was enough to get SB 1492 through the Senate Commerce and Tourism Committee by a single vote.

The compromise was also enough to get the bill onto the agenda of the Senate Community Affairs Committee — where it once again survived by a single vote.

The compromise was also a fraud.

Because seven weeks later — on the final day of the Legislature’s 60-day session — Republican leaders in the Senate decided to take up the House version of the bill anyway. Just two hours before gaveling this year’s session to a close, the Florida Senate voted 24-15 to pass HB 433, which, though it had been tweaked, largely resembled the legislation that senators had seemingly abandoned before.

(The House bill is actually even worse for workers, because it would also prohibit local communities from passing “fair work week” laws that require businesses to give hourly workers advance notice of their weekly schedules.)

The bait-and-switch ultimately accomplished two goals for Senate Republican leaders.

It helped them sidestep a couple of tough committees in order to pass a priority bill for the Florida Chamber of Commerce, which records show gave more than $400,000 last year to a fund controlled by Senate GOP leadership. 

But it also helped them protect their potentially vulnerable incumbents. Because both Rodriguez and Calatayud were ultimately allowed to vote against the bill — but only after their votes no longer mattered. 

Garcia then lists the other bills that were passed by the Legislature before it recessed.

They included:

Loosening child labor laws (having banned undocumented immigrants, the Legislature had to make it easier for businesses to hire teenagers)

Permit school districts to hire religious chaplains to counsel students in school

Lower the standards for teachers in “classical schools,” the charter schools based on the Hillsdale College curriculum

Extend Florida’s “Stop Woke Act,” which limits teaching about racism or sexism, to education-preparation courses

“Reduce regulations on natural gas pipelines, prohibit offshore wind energy, and erase most mentions of climate change from state law.”

Moderation? No.

John Thompson, historian and teacher, asks who was responsible for the death of Nex Benedict. In this article in The Progressive, he blames the hateful anti-rhetoric of Oklahoma’s elected officials. The officials concluded that Nex committed suicide. Who created the environment in which this child was tormented by classmates?

He writes:

We are learning more about the death of Nex Benedict, a non-binary high school student who died on February 8, the day after they were beaten in the school bathroom in Owasso, Oklahoma. We are also learning about ourselves, as Oklahomans, as we deal with the tragedy. But we are not alone. This bitter attack is a case study in the cruelty being spread across the nation by right-wing extremists. 

Vigils were held across the nation in honor of Nex, who has a Choctaw heritage. The diverse crowd I witnessed at the Oklahoma City vigil was so large that I could barely hear the speakers. We still don’t fully know everything about Nex’s death, but it is clear that it must be viewed within the context of vicious attacks on LGBTQ+ youth by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters and Governor Kevin Stitt as well as the fifty-plus Republican legislative bills attacking LBGTQ+ rights across the country.

Since he was elected in 2019, Governor Stitt has signed laws that restrict access to public school bathrooms; ban health care for transgender people under eighteen; ban transgender girls and women from school sports; and prohibit Oklahomans from obtaining nonbinary gender markers on official documents. He also signed, as the LGTBQ+ rights group GLAAD reported, “an executive order that defunds diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and programs in state agencies, including public colleges.”

Walters has a similar record: He has depicted transgender students as a threat in schools, and approved a permanent rule change that requires schools to get state approval before altering gender markers in a student’s records. Walters has advocated for book bans and described LGBTQ+-themed books as “pornographic material.” He also appointed Chaya Raichik, the founder of anti-LGBTQ+ social media account Libs of TikTok, to the education department’s Library Media Advisory Committee.

Beyond Walters and Stitt, state representatives have also spread hateful rhetoric in recent months. State Senator Tom Woods, for example, called LGBTQ+ Oklahomans “filth” during a panel. Days later, Woods chose to stand by his statement, saying:   

We are a religious state and we are going to fight it to keep that filth out of the state of Oklahoma because we are a Christian state—we are a moral state . . . . We want to lower taxes and let people be able to live and work and go to the faith they choose. We are a Republican state and I’m going to vote my district, and I’m going to vote my values, and we don’t want that in the state of Oklahoma.

Blogger Steve Ruis pulls apart the theological ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court, holding that frozen embryos are children. The Court invoked religious language to assert that destroying a frozen embryo is murder, and anyone who does that can be sued as if they terminated the life of a child. Frozen embryos are in a freezer, not a womb, but the Justices endow them with the status of a living child.

In Vitro Fertilization clinics across Alabama—and elsewhere—are panicked. Couples use IVF when they can’t conceive; typically, they freeze more than they need because, for whatever reason, some of those embryos fail. One couple I know froze 10 embryos; they now have two beautiful, healthy children. But if the Alabama ruling were commonly endorsed, the other eight frozen embryos could never be destroyed. Long after the parents are dead, long after their grandchildren are dead, the embryos would be preserved. Forever.

Ruis writes:

Just when I thought the SCOTUS was the greatest threat to democracy we faced in our court system, the Supreme Court of the State of Alabama stepped up by deciding that frozen embryos are “extrauterine children.”

According to their Chief Justice, Tom Parker:
“The Alabama constitution’s ‘sanctity of unborn life’ provision, he wrote, ‘encompasses the following: (1) God made every person in His image; (2) each person therefore has a value that far exceeds the ability of human beings to calculate; and (3) human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.’”

Apparently the Alabama Supreme Court has not heard of the separation of church and state. And I am surprised that they weren’t singing Monty Python’s song “Every Sperm is Sacred” while issuing their ruling.

This immediately put the brakes on all of the In Vitro Fertilization therapies currently under way. If you are unfamiliar with IVF it is a process where infertile couples can have fertilized embryos implanted in the woman’s uterus. The embryos are frozen awaiting this process and are willingly donated by fertile women.

So, here’s the bind the fertility clinics are in. They cannot go ahead with the IVF treatments because the “success rate is low, that is many embryos do not implant in the uterine wall and are flushed out during a waste cycle. This would be considered a wrongful death under the law and the desperate parents and doctors could all go to jail. So, all of these clinics are to put their frozen embryos on ice, as it were.

But, here is the problem. Those embryos under Alabama law cannot be implanted, so they have to stay frozen . . .in perpetuity. But what happens down there in hurricane country of the electric power is knocked out for a number of days. Without electricity, all of those embryos would thaw and “die.” Would that be considered a mass murder on the part of the clinic or an “act of God,” under their laws.

I know the solution. All of the Bible thumpers need to step up and adopt one of these “extrauterine children,” providing them with an uninterruptable supply of electricity and to take responsibility if they die. Then we will know they are truly “pro life.”

Remaining frozen forever, never to run and play in the park . . . so much for the sanctity of life.

The Houston Chronicle reported yesterday that Republicans who voted to oppose Governor Greg Abbott’s voucher program are being bombarded with fake ads, distorting their support for their local public schools. Governor Abbott received a gift of $6 million from Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass to advance vouchers, as well as more from billionaire oil tycoons Wilks, Dunn, and Farris. Clearly he’s putting this bonanza into a campaign of lies. Abbott says that polls show that Texans want vouchers. If that were true (it’s not), Abbott should run honest ads saying, “Don’t vote for this guy because he opposes vouchers.”

During the regular session and four special sessions, Abbott held public school funding and teacher pay hostage. He said he would not give a penny to public schools or their teachers unless he got vouchers. Twenty-one Republicans opposed vouchers, so now Abbott accuses them of sabotaging the funding of public schools and teacher pay.

Abbott won’t run honest ads because he knows that Texans don’t want to spend their taxes to pay for religious schools and to subsidize the tuition of rich kids in private schools. His ads lie because the Governor knows vouchers are unpopular. They have been voted down in every state that has put them on the ballot.

Reporter Jason Scherer writes:

The ad opens with a dramatic message: “Steve Allison failed our teachers and kids.”

It says the San Antonio Republican stopped a bill in the Texas House last year that would have raised teacher pay, ended STAAR testing and poured more than $200 million into public schools in his district. “You deserve better,” the narrator concludes.

RELATED: Who’s behind the campaign mailers flooding GOP districts? Most lead back to megadonor oil tycoons

What the ad, from the Family Empowerment Coalition PAC, fails to mention is that Allison supported all of those measures. Gov. Greg Abbott refused to sign a package that included them into law unless it included private school vouchers, which Allison opposed.

The PAC is using similarly misleading online ads to target at least a dozen Republican state House members who voted to strip the voucher proposalfrom a $7 billion education funding bill in November. The PAC is one of several groups that have worked in conjunction with Abbott ahead of the March primaries to unseat GOP lawmakers who rejected the governor’s push last year to give parents taxpayer dollars to send their kids to private schools.

Twenty-one House Republicans joined with every Democrat in the chamber to strike vouchers from the bill. The GOP author then withdrew the entire package, citing Abbott’s threat to veto any education funding that did not come with vouchers.

Allison, a former Alamo Heights ISD board president who has long pushed for Texas to bolster school funding, said the ad’s claims are a “flat-out falsehood.”

BACKGROUND: Texas House rejects school voucher proposal, dealing blow to Abbott, private school advocates

“There was absolutely no reason in the world why the rest of that bill couldn’t have gone forward — and I think we would have passed it,” Allison said, adding that he supported the rest of the $7 billion measure. If anything, he argued, it did not go far enough to boost education funding.

Leo Linbeck, a leader and co-founder of the Family Empowerment Coalition PAC, has contended that “anti-voucher extremists” were responsible for the bill’s demise, arguing that they received major concessions and were only asked to approve a limited voucher program “that would have served 1% of kids, all poor.”

“(W)hen you strip out a major part of a compromise bill, it dies,” Linbeck wrote on X last month.

Linbeck did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

The ads are just one example of how Abbott and the cadre of pro-voucher political groups have made only sparing reference to vouchers, instead focusing on teacher pay raises, border security and abortion in their political ads.

The Family Empowerment Coalition has been among the most active players in the state House primaries, spending some $762,000 through late January to attack anti-voucher Republicans and support their primary challengers. Other founding members include Doug Deason, a prominent Dallas GOP donor, and former state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., a Democrat who supported vouchers in the Legislature.

Beyond attacks on school funding, they have also accused GOP members of being “weak on the border” and promoted their challengers as stronger advocates for border security — a topic that carries far more weight among GOP primary voters than vouchers, according to a recent statewide poll.

State Rep. Ernest Bailes, a Shepherd Republican who opposes school vouchers, is another of the group’s targets. His main rival is Janis Holt, a school board trustee and owner of an air purification company who also challenged Bailes in 2022.

More than three-quarters of Holt’s campaign funding has come from the Family Empowerment Coalition PAC and Abbott, who endorsed her in January.

“Governor Abbott needs an ally to fight with him for a secure border,” one of the Family Empowerment Coalition PAC’s ads reads. “That’s why he has endorsed Janis Holt for HD 18.”

The PAC ran another ad accusing Allison of bragging “that he helped close the border, even though he didn’t. That’s why Gov. Abbott didn’t endorse him.”

But the ad leaves out that every Republican in the Texas House, including Allison and Bailes, supported a far-reaching new law that empowers state officials to essentially deport people who are suspected of crossing the border illegally. They also backed a contentious bill that establishes stiffer penalties for human smuggling and approved more than $6.5 billion for border security over the next two years, including $1.5 billion to continue building a wall along Texas’ southern border.

Allison called the border-focused ads “outrageous,” pointing to his votes for the slate of GOP immigration bills.

“I’d like to see them point to one border bill that I didn’t vote for, or show anything that I’ve ever done except being 100% behind border security,” Allison said. “I’ve been down there three times. I have voted for every appropriation — I was on (the House) Appropriations (Committee) — and voted for every request the governor has made.”

Abbott is running a digital ad promoting Allison’s main challenger, attorney and former Bexar County district attorney GOP nominee Marc LaHood, as an ally in his fight to “stop the flow of illegal immigrants, crime and drugs into Texas.” The governor has run the same version of the ad for several other candidates running to unseat anti-voucher Republicans.

The governor also invited 20 Republican House members to the border last week for a press conference where he touted their bona fides on border legislation. Abbott did not invite any voucher opponents to the press conference.