Woe is Texas for its Legislators’ Ignorance
In the cause of “pro-life” some Republican Texas lawmakers are seeking to provide for the potential execution of women who have abortions and the doctors who provide them, taking from the legislation off Nazi Germany (1940-1945) Texas Republican Representative Bryan Lee Slaton has introduced the “Abolition of Abortion through Equal Protection for All Unborn Children Act.”1
Bryon Slaton and his wife Sharmen was endorsed by the TEA Party July 14, 2020 in the runoff election for Texas House District 2. He authored legislation to make abortion of any fetus capital murder and the mother who aborts the fetus is to be charged with murder and if she causes the death of a fertilized egg charged with negligent homicide. He has no education in medicine or science.
The intent and effect of the Act is to define from the moment of conception a fertilized egg as a full human and the termination of it as murder: “A living human child, from the moment of fertilization . . . is entitled to the same rights, powers, and privileges as are secured or granted by the laws of this state to any other human child.” The Bill then expressly states that the provisions of the Texas Penal Code relating to criminal homicide (Chapter 19) shall be enforced in regards to abortion, “regardless of any contrary federal statute, regulation, treaty, order, or court decision.” Those Texas homicide statutes provide for the punishment of murderers to include execution. In particular, § 19.03 of the Texas Penal Code defines capital murder as including: “the person murders an individual under 10 years of age.”2 The Bill provides no exception for rape or incest.
Texas Legislature House District 2
Slaton’s bill provides a medical exception that extends only to an ectopic pregnancy and nothing else. A woman could be charged with negligent homicide if her carelessness resulted in the death of a fertilized egg. A person picking up a woman from getting an abortion could be charged with aiding and abetting murder for driving what would amount to the “get away car.” This Republicanazi “represents” the heatedly contested 2nd District in the Texas House: one of the partisan-gerrymandered districts with 75.5% Anglos (non-Hispanic), with only 21.3% being college educated and 18.7% having a bachelor’s degree or higher, with 54.4% percent having an income $50,000 or higher, and over 77% living in a house built after 1990 (with over 85% being home owners): common with racist American Nazis and Trump supporters.3 Born February 2, 1978, he attended Ouachita Baptist University and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and is a Southern Baptist preacher but gave up that calling to work at his family-owned Stat Financial Services.4 Slaton was endorsed by the TEA Party,5 listens only to Fox News, and is a white christian conservative who supports Proud Bois and the attempt to overthrow the US Government on January 6. He is a strong supporter of Trump who “fought for a secure border, and now Biden and the democrats are fighting to undo those changes.”6
Texas health under Republican control
HOUSTON, TEXAS – AUGUST 18: Emergency Room nurses and EMTs tend to patients in hallways at the Houston Methodist The Woodlands Hospital on August 18, 2021 in Houston, Texas. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Texas, by the end of September 2021, gained the distinction of having most overburdened hospitals in the nation with no ICU beds available for life-saving surgeries or births. Cindy Zolnierek, CEO of the Texas Nurses Association, said that if someone gets into a car accident or is having a heart attack, hospital beds may not be available for them. “They’re not available for all these other situations where someone has a medical crisis and needs an ICU,” she said. “If it’s a Covid patient, then that bed is not available to these other folks.” In Texas, data shows that ICUs have stayed more than 90 percent full since the middle of August, and have stayed around 80 percent since July 2020, with some of its hospitals reporting 100 percent ICU occupancy for months.7 Of the 100 intensive care units that have spent the most weeks at or over patient capacity from July 2020 to Sept. 23, Texas is home to 17, the highest in the nation. Rio Grande was not the only Texas hospital experiencing repeated weeks of full ICUs. Park Plaza Hospital in Houston has seen 55 weeks of full occupancy since July 2020. HCA Houston Healthcare Southeast in Pasadena saw 45 weeks of full capacity during that time. More than 200 hospitals in the state have been maxed out at least once, but many more have tread close, with occupancies of more than 90 percent.8
Pity Iowa
Annette Sweeney (R-IA)
The Texas bill is as stupid as the utterances of State Senator Annette Sweeney (born December 9, 1957) of Hardin County, Iowa, who told me in a lengthy correspondence that every drop of sperm and every ova/egg was a human being. She went on to further state:” Any male of any age who masturbates is guilty of premeditate first degree intentional murder. She remained mute when I asked her about females who masturbated. It took her some time to pause and then she lashed out and pontificated, “females do not masturbate…no female would touch herself in an impure manner if she ever hoped to have a chaste husband as god the father demands.” Her outburst was the result of my published books on abortion that she considered “Satan inspired.” She was a middle school teacher of English and speech,9 for a short time in Peoria, Illinois before taking over the family farm in the small village of Buckeye,10 Iowa, with a population of 86 according to the 2020 census. Sweeney is state senator for the 25t district and has been in the Iowa Senate since 2018. She had a seat in the Iowa House from 2009 to 2013. Iowa, and especially Hardin County, has been terrorized by the KKK since the end of the nineteenth century, with the Klavern of the KKK in Boone, Iowa, and American Nazi Party of Iowa in Charles City, Iowa. Leanore Goodenow wrote of her encounters with the KKK in Hardin County,11 and a faction still thrives in the city of Eldora with it morphing into a strong Trump Party. The Fraternal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan formed outside of Postville, Iowa,12 protesting Mexican laborers at the Agriprocessessors meat packing plant.13 In March 2010, the KKK had a firm foot in Cedar Valley (Postville, Iowa) Brother Douglas, Imperial
KKK in Postville, Iowa demonstrating against Mexican labor and Jews at Postville
Wizard of the Fraternal White Knights (FWK) of the KKK, said the FWKs have almost 100 members in Iowa. Douglas said the FWKs now have Klaverns (a group of seven or more members) in at least 11 Iowa towns including Cedar Falls (where the state has the University of Northern Iowa) and Waterloo (home of John Deere Tractor works, and formerly the base for Rath meats).14 The FWK state headquarters are located in Charles City. The Iowa KKK is violently anti-Semitic, anti-Latino, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, and very pro-Trump and pro-Sweeney voting almost unanimously for any Republican who runs as dramatically shown in the 2020 election in Hardin County where some of the most corrupt were returned to or installed in office.
Animal cruelty in Iowa agribusiness in Iowa
Annette Sweeney authored legislation against whistleblowing on Iowa agribusiness cruelty, making filming adverse conditions and photographing animal cruelty a crime–in exchange for political donations.15 Sweeney excused cruelty as part of agribusiness and told reporters to get use to it as it had always happened and legislation to prohibit it would hurt the income of Iowans who benefited from it by having jobs. Like Governor Kim Reynolds, the bottom line is always profit.
The American Nazi Party (neo-Nazis) are responsible for the vandalism throughout Iowa, especially writing hate speech on a church bus owned and operated by the Bethel AME16 Church in Clinton, Iowa,17 April 27, 2018. Words written with a marker included Nigger Die Soon 1488 with an image of a gun scope with “14” and “88” on it–which are also numbers referring to a white supremacist declaration and the numerical code for “Heil Hitler” a popular greeting in the Eldora, Iowa, High School.
Amana Colonies ended up on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s nationwide map of hate groups and had the Amanas as a place to hold a “book club” in 2016, and listed Amana as one of several locations in the nation for The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi hate group. The Daily Stormer gained special notoriety last week for being one of the organizers of the ‘Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., that turned deadly.
The Rise and Growth of Nazis in the USA
Hundreds of German Americans give the Nazi salute to young men marching in Nazi uniforms. The event was a German Day celebration sponsored by German American Bund at Camp Sigfried on Long Island.
Youths at a German-American Bund camp stand at attention as the American flag and the German-American Youth Movement flag, right, are lowered in a ceremony at sundown in Andover, New Jrsey, July 21, 1937. One person plays the drum, right, and two people make the Hitler salute. (AP Photo)
Nearly 1,000 uniformed men wearing swastika arm bands and carrying Nazi banners parade past a reviewing stand in New Jersey on July 18, 1937. The New Jersey division of the German-American Bund opened its 100-acre Camp Nordland at Sussex Hills. Dr. Salvatore Caridi of Union City, spokesman for a group of Italian-American Fascists attending as guests, addressed the bund members as “Nazi Friends.”
Nazi salute in schools in the USA in Iowa, Texas, Alabama, New York, New Jersey, etc.
While hate group activity increasingly has moved to cyberspace, Ryan Lenz, a spokesperson for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said The Daily Stormer took the opposite approach in 2016 by calling for members and would-be members to attend ‘book clubs” and meet one another. ‘They decided to take these ideas offline for recruitment and for propagation of the idea,” Lenz said. Once the center’s researchers uncovered the cities where these meet ups were to take place, the cities were added to the map when it was updated this year. Lenz said it was impossible to know how many times the meetups took place.18 The Daily Stormer included in its post “Reply if you’d be down. CR [Cedar Rapids], IC [Iowa City], Davenport, Waterloo, etc … The Amana Colonies might be a sweet place to meet. There is an awesome free shooting range on Amana road plus it is a historic German community [and it implied that the Amanas were still fond of Hitler, like New York City was in 1936-1943]19.” Iowa County Sheriff Rob Rotter said, sternly, ‘If anyone out there has the idea that it’s a German community, they’re Nazi sympathizers, that’s insane. I grew up there. I can tell you, they’re proud Americans and nothing more.”18
White supremacist spray paint is covered up at the Riverside Theatre festival stage in City Park on October 17, 2020, in Iowa City. The full message read: We are everywhere [Nazi Swastika] voting will not remove them.
Trump’s attraction to Hitler
Trump startled when his lies are called out
Unsurprising, the greatest threat to the United States of America is Donald Trump Sr, his family, and the GOP. He was without to be president qualifications, but he appealed to the base instinct of hate and found a home for his violent rhetoric in white evangelical christians: the same people who brought Adolf Hitler to power in the Weimar Republic. In both scenarios, it was white christian evangelical women that led to the rise of both would-be gods: Hitler and Trump. In both countries it was the draconian legacy of Martin Luther: the revolutionary, not the theologian. In both cases Luther confirmed the cultural belief that God divinely grants power to the leader. A song popular in Germany before the time of Hitler pleaded, “Oh God, send us a Führer who will change our misfortune by God’s word.” Within both the American and German public: most women were either supportive of the Third Reich or passively upheld it by conforming to its norms, staying silent, and focusing solely on their own families. Christian women supported Nazism because it benefited them, and it seemed to reinforce the cultural values that gave meaning and purpose to their lives, and was the same mindset of American evangelical women that brought about the destruction of their land by their new-found god: Trump. They believed God was in control and had blessed their culture and their leader for special greatness—and that outsiders and foreign influence needed to be subjugated or eradicated in order for Germans to protect themselves.
On the Jews and Their Lies a book by Martin Luther, 1543
The Germans had been taught to fear and hate the Jews by Martin Luther who wrote his embittered pamphlet of 1543 (Von den Jüden und iren Lügen) On the Jews and Their Lies, where he denounced all Jews when they refused to convert to his god, and called on the German people to persecute and kill every Jew. Luther argues that Jewish synagogues and schools be set on fire, their prayer books destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, homes burned, and property and money confiscated. They should be shown no mercy or kindness,23 afforded no legal protection,24 and “these poisonous envenomed worms” should be drafted into forced labor or expelled for all time.25 He also seems to advocate their murder, writing “[W]e are at fault in not slaying them”.26 This was a stark rejection by Luther of his earlier works, where he acknowledged that many early Christians had a Judaic background.27. Christianity-Revealed.com (published 2011). Retrieved 2019-04-05. For more than one hundred years after Jesus’ resurrection […] there were always bishops in Jerusalem from the tribe of the children of Israel, a[ll] of whom our Eusebius mentions by name (Eccl. Hist., Bk. 4, ch. 5). He begins with St. James the apostle and enumerates about fifteen of them, a[ll] of whom preached the gospel with great diligence, performed miracles and lived a holy life, converting many thousands of Jews and children of Israel to their promised Messiah who had now appeared, Jesus of Nazareth; apart from these there were the Jews living in the Diaspora who were converted together with the Gentiles by St. Paul, other apostles, and their disciples. This was accomplished despite the fact that the other faction, the blind, impenitent Jews the fathers of the present-day Jews raved, raged, and ranted against it without letup and without ceasing, and shed much blood of members of their own race both within their own country and abroad among the Gentiles […]. The peoples, that is, not only the Jews but also the Gentiles, are in perfect accord in their obedience […]; they have become one people, that is, Christians.”] and Luther continues to discuss the Jewish people, but could not understand why they did not adopt his faith (that which became Lutheranism), since he believed he argued it well.
Anti-Catholic octopus cartoon (Wikimedia Commons)
It has been equally argued that The
Americans had been taught to fear and hate Catholics28 and Jews29” by their pastors.30
In Germany: more than half of the German population was Lutheran, while 40 percent was Catholic. Unfortunately, in the USA the majority of the population was conservative Christian who viewed liberal Christianity as tantamount to Judaism and Islam, two faiths the women thought defiled their faith. Today, just 55 percent of Germans claim to be members of Catholic or Protestant churches. Similarly, fortunately, Christianity is hemorrhaging members at a growing rate. Fear of this has led many to turn to superstition (QAnon) in the states. especially in the south where variant forms of pseudo-christianity and televangelism are rising.
Racism exposed with Nazism in the USA
In the United States Nazis was strong prior to and during World War II. George Bush’s grandfather, US Senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.31 His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy. While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. When Hitler became Chancellor Germany, most American newspapers nationwide reported on Nazi German’s persecution of Jews and other groups. There was no sustained nationwide effort in the US to oppose the mistreatment of Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or members of the LGBTQIA community. Racism and antisemitism and homophobia were common in the US, and segregation was enforced by laws, customs, and violence. Immigration laws were advanced on the prejudice of the myth of white supremacy, promoting the American “ideal” American as white and Protestant. Antisemitism increased in the United States throughout the 1930s. The majority of Americans did not support easing restrictive immigration laws to assist the hundreds of thousands of Jews attempting to flee Europe. For the most part, sympathy did not translate into action to aid the victims of Nazism. The United States did not immediately open its doors to Holocaust survivors. The Displaced Persons Act in 1948 eventually allowed about 400,000 displaced persons to enter the United States, though the majority were not Jewish.32 The most racist, anti-Semitic and hate-filled states were Texas,33 New Jersey, Iowa (by 2016 the 5th most racist state) Georgia, Indiana, Alabama, New York, and Mississippi–the hatred pushed by white christian evangelicals. Today the most racist states are West Virginia (first)34, Maryland, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Vermont, New York, Georgia, and Texas where racial slurs are still common.35 The states that have made the most racial progress of ending racism are New Mexico, Hawaii, and Wyoming.36 This problem became bold under Donald J. Trump, Sr, the former guy.37
Black and white: friends
Three quarters of “whites” do not have any “non-white” friends.38 Blacks are more afraid of the police, with justifiable reasons, than are white people. The history between many black communities and the police forces that serve them is long, complicated, often violent and characterized by an extreme imbalance of power.39 PRRI’s (Public Religion Research Institute)40 data show that a full 75 percent of whites have “entirely white social networks without any minority presence.” The same holds true for slightly less than two-thirds of black Americans. Blacks have ten times as many black friends as white friends. But white Americans have an astonishing 91 times as many white friends as black friends.
Bills to penalize the teaching of the 1619 Project, named for the arrival of African captives in America, were introduced in Republican-controlled state legislature this year
Denying racism today is primarily a Republican mantra41…ignoring its own racial hypocrisy in legislating the suppression of the 1619 Project and the academic scale of Critical Race Theory is a building block to undo centuries of racism in the USA.42 It will not change until every individual changes and accepts the reality that the USA has always been a racist nation and will remain one until we accept our racist past.43
NOTES
- https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87R/billtext/pdf/HB03326I.pdf#navpanes=0. ↩
- https://codes.findlaw.com/tx/penal-code/penal-sect-19-03.html. ↩
- https://wrm.capitol.texas.gov/fyiwebdocs/pdf/house/dist2/profile.pdf. ↩
- https://bryanslaton.com/about-bryan/. ↩
- https://www.teaparty911.com/tea-party-candidates/. ↩
- https://www.facebook.com/BryanSlatonForTexas/. ↩
- https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/never-ending-nightmare-hospitals-where-icu-hospitalizations-stayed-high-n1280318?cid=eml_nbn_20210929&user_email=686237db5b0d25479b39ff34a6243ce66c91daf17a2ad0547cfbd09545d3835d&%243p=e_sailthru&_branch_match_id=920793345565387697&utm_medium=Email%20Sailthru. ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- http://www.iowasenaterepublicans.com/senators/annette-sweeney/. ↩
- Buckeye was settled as a railroad town following construction of the railroad through that territory. The village has a total area of 1 square mile. Cf. https://web.archive.org/web/20120702145235/http://www.census.gov/geo/www/gazetteer/files/Gaz_places_national.txt. ↩
- https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/213510726.pdf. Cf. Mott, Frank L. “Farm, Stock, and Diary Journals.” The Palimpsest 44 (1963), 341-360.
Available at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/palimpsest/vol44/iss8/5. ↩ - https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/investigations/2018/05/10/postville-immigration-raid-10-year-anniversary-town-reclaims-identity/587995002/. ↩
- https://vinnews.com/2010/03/12/postive-ia-nazi-group-kkk-claims-it-helped-bringdown-agriprocessors/. Cf. https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/investigations/2018/05/10/postville-raid-anniversary-timeline-aaron-rubashkin-agriprocessors-postville-iowa-immigration-raid/588025002/. ↩
- https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/07/30/postville-iowa-immigration-raid-documentary. Cf. https://wcfcourier.com/gallery-postville-immigration-raid-may-12-2008/collection_e8501c88-2652-5257-b17a-4821b6ea3e1c.html. ↩
- https://arthuride.wordpress.com/2012/09/02/rape-incest-rep-steven-king-r-ia-and-abortion/. ↩
- African Methodist Episcopal. ↩
- https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/crime-and-courts/2018/05/04/clinton-iowa-police-investigating-neo-nazi-vandalism-african-american-church-iowa-hate-speech/580878002/. ↩
- https://www.thegazette.com/news/how-amana-ended-up-on-a-hate-map-neo-nazis-met-there-last-year-for-lunch-or-did-they/. ↩
- https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/06/american-nazis-in-the-1930sthe-german-american-bund/529185/. ↩
- https://www.thegazette.com/news/how-amana-ended-up-on-a-hate-map-neo-nazis-met-there-last-year-for-lunch-or-did-they/. ↩
- https://www.press-citizen.com/story/news/crime-and-courts/2020/10/19/iowa-city-police-nazi-symbol-white-supremacist-vandalism-city-park/3710364001/. ↩
- https://www.press-citizen.com/story/news/politics/2020/09/23/dhs-secretary-white-supremacy-poses-persistent-and-lethal-threat/3511913001/. ↩
- Michael, Robert. “Luther, Luther Scholars, and the Jews,” Encounter 46:4, (Autumn 1985), p. 342. ↩
- Ibid., p 343. ↩
- Luther, Martin. On the Jews and Their Lies, Luthers Werke. 47:268–271. ↩
- Luther, Martin. On the Jews and Their Lies, cited in Michael, Robert. “Luther, Luther Scholars, and the Jews,” Encounter 46 (Autumn 1985) No. 4:343–344. ↩
- Luther, Martin (1543). Von den Jüden und iren Lügen [On the Jews and their lies ↩
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/12/america-history-of-hating-catholics. Ref. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/12/america-history-of-hating-catholics. ↩
- Ronit Y. Stahl, “A Jewish America and a Protestant Civil Religion: Will Herberg, Robert Bellah, and Mid-Twentieth Century American Religion,” ReligionsI 2015.6 pp. 434-450. ↩
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/25058627. Cf. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/09/when-america-hated-catholics-213177/. Cp. http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/nromcath.htm. ↩
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar. ↩
- https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/question/how-did-the-united-states-government-and-american-people-respond-to-nazism. ↩
- https://theconversation.com/texas-voting-law-builds-on-long-legacy-of-racism-from-gop-leaders-166807. Cp, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/. ↩
- https://worldpopulationreview.com/states/west-virginia-population. ↩
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/11/09/the-n-word-an-entrenched-racial-slur-now-more-prevalent-than-ever/?itid=lk_inline_manual_11. Cf.https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/. ↩
- https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/most-racist-states. Data suggests that Republicans have a “race problem”.[1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/04/14/data-suggest-republicans-have-a-race-problem/?variant=116ae929826d1fd3. Cf. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html. ↩
- https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/republicans-wish-trump-would-be-a-little-less-openly-racist?gclid=CjwKCAjwndCKBhAkEiwAgSDKQdYg–prZvcWk3XAUOPDgfjHQ6HRkkdXY99i4r6SepHjCg8gmYya0BoCl8wQAvD_BwE. ↩
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/25/three-quarters-of-whites-dont-have-any-non-white-friends/?variant=116ae929826d1fd3. ↩
- https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/08/Reparations-For-Ferguson/376098/. ↩
- https://www.prri.org/. ↩
- https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/28/gop-primary-america-racist-2024-500680. ↩
- https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-republican-party-racial-hypocrisy-and-the-1619-project. ↩
- https://apnews.com/article/business-wisconsin-education-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-dc73ee7fd8962ea52f56eae2319055d5. https://apnews.com/article/education-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-north-carolina-teaching-814beeb7ac919a0116b70d476e213acc. Cp. https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06. Cf. https://theoutline.com/post/2129/a-compendium-of-racism-in-the-republican-party. Ref. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/5/republican-party-can-not-waste-opportunity-to-addr/?utm_source=GOOGLE&utm_medium=cpc&utm_id=chacka&utm_campaign=TWT+-+DSA&gclid=CjwKCAjwndCKBhAkEiwAgSDKQTUYsdfgx85A0mZp6jVB7dLDzau62mny8K7wM5AJBLcd-fi_WtOEmBoC91AQAvD_BwE. ↩
Without reading through this, I’ll just say that racism has been around from the beginning of human existence, and probably exists throughout the animal kingdom. It is the cheapest and easiest way to consolidate a group of “voters” to a common cause. Create a common enemy. Racism. It is universal.
It is a tragedy, and you are correct. It will only subside and hopefully, in time, be erased by education and removal of societal borders. Thanks for your comment.