Government

If I Owned Hell And Texas, I’d Live In Hell And Rent Out Texas

Well-founded criticism ultimately comes from a place of admiration.

By  
on

(Image via Shutterstock)

The exact phrasing was reported a number of ways by contemporaneous newspaper accounts, but sources generally agree that about 150 years ago, on a hot August day in San Antonio, the distinguished and dust-caked General Philip Sheridan uttered, “If I owned Texas and all Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.”

It’s said that Sheridan acknowledged later that the remark was made in frustration at a time when he was “a tad warm” with his “eyes and ears and throat” filled with Texas dust. He explained that the colorful saying “did not represent [his] true opinion of this magnificent state.” As someone who’s spent time in San Antonio during the summer myself, I can certainly understand Sheridan’s impulse.

All that’s to say that I, too, hope true Texans don’t take what I’m about to say as disparagement of their fine state. Well-founded criticism ultimately comes from a place of admiration. You wouldn’t bother to try to improve a place’s circumstances if you didn’t care about it. And Texas undoubtedly has a lot going for it: wide open spaces, a fantastic music scene, and a pretty cool space center, among other things.

Lately though, Texas, what the hell? A number of the Texas government’s recent policy decisions seem calculated to turn the great state into the abode of Mephistopheles that Sheridan compared it to a century and a half ago.

The most-discussed aspect of Texas’ recent descent into damnation is its new abortion ban. This law prohibits abortions after the point at which a fetal heartbeat can be detected. It is facially unconstitutional under standing Supreme Court precedent and has been condemned as a violation of international law by the United Nations. Also, many women don’t even know they are pregnant before the six-week cutoff point, and there are no exceptions for rape or incest.

The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, said not to worry though, because Texas is going to “eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas” by aggressively prosecuting them. Ah, what? Rape has been codified as a crime (albeit problematically) since at least 1780 BC when Hammurabi’s Code was set in stone, and we haven’t managed to prosecute rape into oblivion yet.

Sponsored

It’s easy enough to understand that some folks who are not getting abortions themselves don’t like it when other people get abortions, even though it in no way affects the latter folks, but isn’t this law a tad extreme? It’s already costing Texas jobs and business investment. It’s not very libertarian either, if that is what Texas was going for.

Then there’s also the new Texas law that makes it legal for almost anyone to arm themselves in public without any kind of permit or training. This makes perfect sense along with the new abortion law since Texans apparently believe in the preciousness of all life unless it sets foot on their property. Even (especially?) gun people, of which I am one, don’t think it’s a good idea to slap a gun into someone’s hand without any training. Gun people love gun training. And, you know, the research is pretty clear that the justifications for these kinds of lax carry laws are bullshit, since crime rates actually rise after laws like this are passed.

Of course, the cherry on the cake is another ill-conceived law that will make it much harder for Texas to undo any of these recent bad policy decisions. Just for good measure, Texas now officially bans 24-hour voting, drive-thru voting, and people sending you a mail-in ballot application. So, if you want to vote out the politicians who forced your fellow Texans to carry unborn children to term against their will, well, better take a whole day off of work. You’re going to need it to face your untrained neighbors who are now armed to the teeth and officially empowered to harass voters as partisan poll watchers.

Texas has become a parody of itself with this rare trifecta of stunningly bad policy decisions. It’s scaring away business, it’s doing irreparable harm to Texas’ reputation, and it’s just going to make life worse for Texans.

Texas is, perhaps, still preferable to hell. Yet, it’s surely not growing into a more inviting place, especially if you’re a woman, someone who wants to vote, or a person who would prefer not to get caught in the crossfire when the pistols are unholstered. I hope Texas can do better.

Sponsored

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

Topics

, , , ,