Brad and Dan begin by discussing the slate of new laws in Texas:
Abortion: The six-week abortion ban that includes a 10k bounty for anyone involved.
Handheld Killing Machines: The new permitless carry law.
Voting: making absentee voting harder, preventing 24-hour voting in Harris County, demanding driver licenses for mail-in votes, etc.
School Curricula: Laws creating an "1836 Project," outlaw discussing current events and systemic racism, and prohibit credit for civic engagement.
The conclusion: Texas is trying to go back to the 1850s (the Antebellum period) and be the vanguard of the New Antebellum period (the time before the 2nd civil war).
They conclude by discussing Kevin McCarthy's and Marjorie Taylor Greene's threats against telecom companies regarding handing over records related to 1/6.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I'm faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center, UCSB, and I'm here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
How are you Brad?
It's good to see you.
Yeah, it's been a week, Dan.
I think personally, you and I have both had weird weeks, but I think as everyone across the nation now knows, we as a nation have had a tough week.
We had Hurricane Ida, and then Hurricane Ida made its way All the way to New Jersey and New York and Philadelphia and parts of New Jersey and New York City underwent catastrophic flooding.
We have fires raging in Northern California.
It is one of those weeks where to deny the ecological collapse we are living through seems very difficult.
On top of that, we have the new Texas abortion law, and it's just actually, and we're going to highlight this today, it's actually just one of a number of new Texas laws that are just overwhelmingly alarming.
The way I'd like to frame today, Dan, is that there's a way that the Texas laws are taking us back to the antebellum South, and I'll explain that in a minute, but to a period where white landowning men really had control over society, culture, people's bodies, and voting rights.
It's also the antebellum South in that we've been talking about a Cold Civil War for a long time, and I really feel like there's a chance we'll look back on what's happening in Texas as a kind of model of what certain states are going to pursue in order to kind of further create the division between what we call blue states and what we call red states.
Now, those labels are actually somewhat misleading in most cases, but there's a way that Texas is creating the model for the new antebellum South, meaning the South before the next Civil War or the Cold Civil War.
And I'm not trying to be alarmist by saying there's a civil war on the horizon in the next months or years or anything, but we have been chronicling how that seems to be where we're headed as a country in some way.
So let's jump into it, Dan.
So, there's a whole new list of Texas laws.
I'm going to talk about a couple of those, including ones about voting rights and school curricula.
We will get to Kevin McCarthy and his warnings to telecom companies about 1-6, but let's start with abortion because that's on everybody's mind.
So, SB 8 in Texas prohibits abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy.
In lieu of government enforcement, private individuals can sue abortion providers or people who assist abortion after an ultrasound can detect what lawmakers define as a fetal heartbeat.
Embryos at this developmental stage don't possess a heart.
Medical and legal experts say that the sound Republican lawmakers are referring to the motion of electrical pulses stimulating muscle cells in a tube that will eventually become part of the heartbeat.
Nonetheless, SB 8 moves forward in prohibiting abortion as early as six weeks.
It also takes the unprecedented step of empowering private citizens to police their neighbors, placing at least a $10,000, quote, bounty on people who provide or aid abortions, inviting random strangers to sue them, according to a federal lawsuit challenging the policy.
So, Dan, we have a couple things.
The banning of abortion as early as six weeks, at which point the large majority of women do not know they are pregnant.
We have this idea that there's a fetal heartbeat, which is really akin to electrical pulses, stimulating muscle cells.
But the real kicker of this, that people are really sort of talking about the icing on the cake, is this $10,000 bounty That those who provide or contribute to the abortion can be sued by anybody who suspects.
I mean, it's essentially an abortion bounty.
So, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her minority rebuttal, wrote, the Texas legislator has deputized the state citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors' medical procedures.
The Supreme Court could have taken up this case.
It instead, you know, 5-4 decision not to, basically saying they're going to let what happened in Texas proceed.
And so there's a lot to talk about here.
I think we both have a lot of thoughts and ways we want to kind of frame this, but I'll throw it to you, Dan.
What do you think?
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