While Trans People Sizzled, Texan’s Shivered!

I don’t anyone doesn’t know what happened Texas last week, but do you know what issues the legislature felt was more important than getting the power and water back on.

Now get ready for this…

Hint it wasn’t about the power grid or boiling water but…

It was that the Star Spangle Banner must play at public events!

Texas Republicans Prioritized Nonsense Over Winterizing The Energy Grid
HuffPost
By Roque Planas
February 23, 2021


AUSTIN, Texas ― Days before a winter storm plunged Texas into a prolonged freeze, bursting water pipes and cutting off electricity, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) announced a new legislative priority: All publicly funded events in the state would have to play the national anthem.

Barring special sessions, the Texas legislature meets only once every two years for five months, so Patrick’s priorities can crowd out other goals. That the archconservative, who presides over the state Senate, thought this issue merited the legislature’s limited bandwidth in the midst of a pandemic and widespread unemployment tells you everything you need to know about him.

Over the last week, as state leaders like Patrick and Gov. Greg Abbott (R) called for investigations into the lapses behind the catastrophic failures that left millions without power, the Star-Spangled Banner Protection Act probably seemed a little less urgent, even to Patrick. But his inane choice of priorities wasn’t unusual. And it helps to understand how things went so wrong in Texas in the first place.
[…]
Instead, Republicans, who have controlled every statewide office and both houses of the legislature since 2003, have prioritized social battles like Patrick’s national anthem crusade. In their zeal, they’ve often neglected ho-hum tasks like winterizing the energy grid, against the advice they themselves commissioned. That lack of interest is the backdrop against which some 4 million Texans lost power at the height of the crisis, while many more were left without drinkable water and dozens died.

Okay so what does this has to do with trans people and issues. Well the last a disaster happened in Texas in 2017 they tried to pass an anti-trans bill.

In perhaps the most emblematic episode of Texas Republicans’ tendency to elevate phantom problems over real ones, legislators finished the 2017 session without taking action on a must-pass sunset bill to keep several state agencies from shutting down. (In Texas, the legislature must periodically vote to perpetuate most state agencies or they get abolished.) This happened not because legislators thought state agencies shouldn’t stay open, but because Patrick had a more urgent project: He wanted to pass a law forcing Texans to use the public restroom of the gender on their birth certificate.

Critics saw that measure as an attack on transgender people, many of whom don’t change their documents after transitioning because of the bureaucratic hurdles involved. Patrick contended that he was, in fact, targeting bathroom-switching sexual predators who, in his mind, could not be prosecuted hard enough under existing law.

Lets face it the Republicans hate us so much that they are will to let people die rather while they put the screws to us.

Back in the seventies and eighties the Republicans found that by attaching trans people, gays, lesbians, minorities, and to keep Christ in Christmas could get them vote and reining in polluters or regulating industry cost them campaign donations.