It has been a long-kept tradition in Texas to not teach our children much about sex. We tell them the basic mechanics of it, that it produces children, that there's a variety of STDs you can catch if you're not careful, and that the only way to avoid all of this mess is by abstaining until marriage. While the idea of staying celibate before getting married may be nice for some people, it's certainly not what everyone does. As Chloe Yates points out in her recent post "Re-Education," this policy of abstinence-only education has failed Texas, but our elected representatives and the GOP have refused to let it go.
Yates brings up some good points in this respect. She provides a link to a study showing that abstinence-only education does not decrease the likelihood of teenagers having sex or using condoms if they do have sex. She points out that Texas has the third highest teen birth rate in the country. This is a very serious issue in our state, and the GOP is still supporting a policy which has been proven to do nothing to fix it. She also points out that this policy is completely based in our politicians' religious ties and has nothing to do with trying to lower the teen birth rate. As she states, this is an unethical policy. Religious doctrine should not determine public policy. Period.
In my opinion, this is a perfectly sound dismissal of the GOP's abstinence-only policy. It shows that it doesn't work, shows that there is a very big issue which this policy is letting become even worse, and shows that the policy is entirely based in religious conviction. Therefore, we conclude that our politicians are doing the wrong thing and should reverse their policy immediately. I agree with Yates. We should fight the GOP's policy for the betterment of our state.
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Friday, August 10, 2012
Medicine and Politics Don't Mix
Lately, medicine has become one of the most pertinent issues in politics. Whether it's the universal health care debate we've been hearing at a national level for the past few years or the fairly recent Texas bill requiring women to get a sonogram before getting an abortion, political ideologies have often left us, the citizens, at the wayside while actively working to make our standard of living worse. The most recent event in this timeline is a so-called "gag order" in the state Women's Health Program (WHP), as an Austin American-Statesman article* explains. The proposed rule would forbid doctors in the program from advising their patients with respect to abortion.
To give you some perspective, the WHP is a state funded organization designed to replace the federally funded Planned Parenthood clinics. The Texas Legislature barred Planned Parenthood in Texas in 2011 because some Planned Parenthood clinics performed abortions. This sparked outrage from the White House, which said that it would stop funding the WHP. Rick Perry's response was a promise to fund the WHP without federal funding and to run it under his own ideology. The WHP is now the only clinic dedicated to helping low-income Texas women, and it no longer allows doctors to so much as mention the word abortion.
This is not a policy aimed at helping the low-income women that the WHP is supposed to serve. It's a policy based solely in the GOP anti-abortion ideology, which makes no exceptions and views abortion as absolutely evil under any and all circumstances. Abortion is perfectly legal in Texas right now, but politicians like Rick Perry are doing everything they can to deny that legal privilege to whomever they can. In this case, they deny it to low-income women. This is not fair. These women are poor and sick. They deserve to hear all of their medical options, not just the ones which are GOP-approved.
This would be bad enough, but according to the Statesman article, many doctors feel discouraged from joining the WHP because of this rule. The rule forbids them from giving what they might believe is sound medical advice, and thus it prevents them from being ethical doctors and doing their jobs. If rules like this make enough of a difference in the program, there may be too few doctors signing up to joining the WHP, and the program could fail. Then low-income women would have nowhere to go and our state would host an even worse health care system than it already does. The GOP's ideology does not belong in medicine. Doctors should be allowed to freely discuss their patients' health. This rule deserves to be repealed.
*Editorial Board. "Remove abortion advice 'gag order.'" The Austin American-Statesman. Opinion. Published August 9, 2012. Accessed August 10, 2012.
Friday, August 3, 2012
Voter ID Laws: What's the Harm?
The following is a response to Carrie Sanders' article titled "Texas voter ID is a must".
Let's think about exactly what we're talking about here. Laws that regulate the way that people vote dabble in an extremely sensitive issue. Historically, the most prevalent voting laws were the Jim Crow laws. In particular, the poll tax prevented many minorities from voting in the South and the Texas Democratic Party didn't allow minorities to vote in its primaries. Obviously, when changing the way that people vote, we don't want to do anything which even resembles these horrible regulations.
But that's exactly what the voter ID law does! According to an article* from the Houston Chronicle, 38.2% of registered voters who do not have photo identification are Hispanic. Compare this to the fact that 21.8% of all registered voters in Texas are Hispanic. We can clearly see that a disproportionate number of Hispanic voters do not have photo identification. This is a fact. Furthermore, it is inevitable that some fraction (and likely a significant one) of those who do not have a photo ID will either not hear about the law or will be unable to obtain an ID by the following election. Many who hear about it and are able to get an ID will still be deterred from doing so because of the time it takes to go to a DPS office and obtain an ID. The simple fact of the matter is that fewer votes would be cast in the election following the passage of this law, and a disproportionate number of those votes would have been from Hispanic voters.
Now, we can clearly ignore these unfortunate statistics if it's shown that the law is, as you say, "a must." This would be the case if there were a significant number of reported cases of voting fraud. However, you neglect to mention any such number, providing no evidence that the law is necessary at all. In fact, the article you mention** only lists six instances of voter fraud over the entire history of the attorney general's office's existence. No other numbers or statistics are given regarding the frequency of voter fraud. The article does mention, as you say, that some Texas House of Representatives elections are decided by as few as 50 votes, but if the number of fraudulent votes per election is as low as six, the probability that voter fraud could change an election's outcome is extremely small.
The given evidence shows that there is nothing suggesting that voter fraud is a problem in Texas, while enacting a counter measure to the perceived issue would disenfranchise Hispanic voters in Texas. Clearly, this measure, the proposed voter ID law, does nothing but harm for Texas. If you want to change my and our colleagues' opinions on this matter, I suggest you bring some evidence to the table.
*Scharrer, Gary. "Facts elusive in Texas voter ID fight." The Houston Chronicle. Published March 25, 2012. Accessed August 3, 2012.
**Abbott, Greg. "ID laws aren't significant obstacle to proper votes." Austin American-Statesman. Published July 8, 2012. Accessed August 3, 2012.
Let's think about exactly what we're talking about here. Laws that regulate the way that people vote dabble in an extremely sensitive issue. Historically, the most prevalent voting laws were the Jim Crow laws. In particular, the poll tax prevented many minorities from voting in the South and the Texas Democratic Party didn't allow minorities to vote in its primaries. Obviously, when changing the way that people vote, we don't want to do anything which even resembles these horrible regulations.
But that's exactly what the voter ID law does! According to an article* from the Houston Chronicle, 38.2% of registered voters who do not have photo identification are Hispanic. Compare this to the fact that 21.8% of all registered voters in Texas are Hispanic. We can clearly see that a disproportionate number of Hispanic voters do not have photo identification. This is a fact. Furthermore, it is inevitable that some fraction (and likely a significant one) of those who do not have a photo ID will either not hear about the law or will be unable to obtain an ID by the following election. Many who hear about it and are able to get an ID will still be deterred from doing so because of the time it takes to go to a DPS office and obtain an ID. The simple fact of the matter is that fewer votes would be cast in the election following the passage of this law, and a disproportionate number of those votes would have been from Hispanic voters.
Now, we can clearly ignore these unfortunate statistics if it's shown that the law is, as you say, "a must." This would be the case if there were a significant number of reported cases of voting fraud. However, you neglect to mention any such number, providing no evidence that the law is necessary at all. In fact, the article you mention** only lists six instances of voter fraud over the entire history of the attorney general's office's existence. No other numbers or statistics are given regarding the frequency of voter fraud. The article does mention, as you say, that some Texas House of Representatives elections are decided by as few as 50 votes, but if the number of fraudulent votes per election is as low as six, the probability that voter fraud could change an election's outcome is extremely small.
The given evidence shows that there is nothing suggesting that voter fraud is a problem in Texas, while enacting a counter measure to the perceived issue would disenfranchise Hispanic voters in Texas. Clearly, this measure, the proposed voter ID law, does nothing but harm for Texas. If you want to change my and our colleagues' opinions on this matter, I suggest you bring some evidence to the table.
*Scharrer, Gary. "Facts elusive in Texas voter ID fight." The Houston Chronicle. Published March 25, 2012. Accessed August 3, 2012.
**Abbott, Greg. "ID laws aren't significant obstacle to proper votes." Austin American-Statesman. Published July 8, 2012. Accessed August 3, 2012.
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