Like other graying journalists, I’ve seen some things, man, and some stuff.
But I can’t say I’ve ever seen a cavalcade of horror rush for the door at the end of the year like I’ve seen in the last several days.
All you can do is feel deep sadness and sympathy for women being terrorized by the Texas Taliban, and especially Kate Cox.
Cox outed herself as a pregnant Texas mother of two who tragically learned that what she hoped to be her third child had a fatal condition. The fetus she carries could rupture her uterus or even kill her, according to real doctors.
Despite that, she can’t have a physician abort the dying fetus and protect her own life. That’s because Texas treats women like livestock, where the women’s owners — the Texas government — decide life-and-death situations for the “little ladies” based on the whims of state lawmakers.
Cox made her crisis public, and the Texas Supreme Court, pretending to be medical experts, told her to go have a miscarriage.
What kind of place creates and inflicts laws that rob women of the most fundamental right guaranteed to all Americans, the right of control over their own bodies?
I know! Iran, Afghanistan and Texas.
Where else can judges posing as doctors dictate medical care without any say from the patients themselves?
I know! Kentucky.
Cox wasn’t the only woman in the South having to fight state government to make decisions about her own body.
A pregnant woman in Kentucky is suing her state government because politicians and judges there won’t let her abort her dead embryo.
Unlike Cox in Texas, the woman doesn’t want to be identified, because that’s how you get killed in places like the South these days.
But her lawyer said real doctors told her the embryo she carries in her uterus no longer has any cardiac activity.
Sorry-not-sorry, court officials there say, but there are no abortions in Kentucky. There’s only women sickened, maimed and killed by a government that has been empowered to decide those things for them.
Kentucky’s “Jane Doe” is courageous enough to file her suit as class action, in hopes of saving other Kentucky women from the horrors of that state’s “holler-ban” crusade against people with ovaries.
Not too far from the antics of the modern Kentucky Klan is a once hard-working election worker in Georgia. After Donald Trump ran for re-election, and lost, she has been terrorized by other right-wing extremists, bullies and bigots. That’s because of false allegations made by Rudy Giuliani.
While Giuliani was in the thick of hammering out nonsense with Trump to support “The Big Lie,” he big-time lied to the media during his show of shows. He said that Atlanta election worker Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother falsified ballot counts.
The women were almost instantly stalked, taunted and terrorized by Trump fanatics, accusing her of treason, calling her their racist slurs reserved for Black people.
“I’m most scared of my son finding me and or my mom hanging in front of our house on a tree having to get news at school that his mom was killed,” Moss said in court this week in a case against Giuliani. “At one point in January 2021, “she said, someone came to her grandmother’s door threatening to make a “citizen arrest.”
Sound like Russia? Try downtown Atlanta.
Farther south, in Florida, that growing bastion of ending rights, state officials are forcing a Florida high school to cough up thousands of dollars. That’s because coaches at the school let a student — who has identified as a girl before she started preschool — to play on the girls volleyball team with other girls.
“The Florida High School Athletic Association fined Monarch High $16,500, ordered the principal and athletic director to attend rules seminars and placed the suburban Fort Lauderdale school on probation for 11 months, meaning further violations could lead to increased punishments,” the Associate Press wrote this week.
The girl was persecuted during a public shaming. Now, she can’t play any high-school sports anywhere for 11 months.
That’s what you get in a state where the Republican Party royalty sees Family Values as meaningful wink-wink-nudge-nudge. “Family Values” is probably the Sharpee-scribbled title on homemade sex tapes kept on the fireplace mantle.
You missed that? Florida GOP Chairman Christian Ziegler, and his blessed Sarasota School Board wife, Bridget Ziegler are embroiled in a nail-biter sex scandal. Bridget is the Florida Republican who gave America “Moms for Liberty,.”T
The Zieglers are at odds with an unnamed trois of their ménage. The unnamed woman insists she/her/hers was sexually assaulted when everything got real at the Zieglers one time with he/him/his and they/them/theirs. Or it might have been during another episode.
These are the people who are forcing families with transgender children to flee to other states where politicians keep their kinky sexual antics out of the news.
Meanwhile, the tenth-grade girl outed by a Broward County School District posse has played 33 games in the last two seasons. Unlike skulky political players like DeSantis and the Zieglers, hundreds of students at the school, when learning about the girl’s plight, walked out of class in protest.
The school still has to hand over $16,500, and the girl who was accosted by team DeSantis now fears for her life because other people sporting Florida Family Values dig that kind of thing when they think no one’s watching.
“Thanks to the leadership of Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida passed legislation to protect girls’ sports and we will not tolerate any school that violates this law,” Education Commissioner Manny Diaz told the Associated Press in a statement. “We applaud the swift action taken by the Florida High School Athletic Association to ensure there are serious consequences for this illegal behavior.”
No doubt there will be similar applause for swift video-taped action among the Zieglers when the recording gets entered as either evidence in a trial against them or as a Movie of the Week on the Florida GOP Has Values Home Sex Aid Shopping Channel.
It’s not even halfway through December. There’s still time for Rep. Meemaw Lauren Boebert — who Tampa Bay Times columnist Daniel Ruth aptly pegged as “The Fondler,” to give another Family Values show of her own and wring in the New Year.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com
Maybe it’s ‘Moms for Libido’?