Today’s stories may make you lose hope in humanity just around the time of year that It’s a Wonderful Life is playing on repeat. I apologize for ending the year on them. (Yes, I’m going to take the next two weeks off to wrap up some projects and some presents.) To make it up to you, I’m going to start with the story of Karen Smith, the new president of the Central Bucks school board in Pennsylvania.
I mentioned Central Bucks once after the election because it was one of the places where sanity triumphed over a DeSantasian version of “parent rights.” With a heavily conservative board in place, the district has been battling banned books and other dog whistle issues in the last few years (think Covid policies, pride flags, and trans athletes). That changed on election night when Democrats swept all five open seats to take control of the board.
The district’s superintendent quit in protest, and at the very last meeting of the outgoing board they voted to give him a $700,000 severance package. The board also voted in a policy banning trans students from playing sports.
Thankfully, most of that was walked back at the December 4th meeting of the new board (which does still have some conservative members). It voted 6-3 to freeze two library policies that effectively banned books, a policy banning the pride flag in school, and the just-passed band on trans kids in sport. It also voted unanimously to investigate whether the large severance package was legal.
The best part of the meeting, however, was when Karen Smith—who was re-elected in November—was sworn in as board president. Smith chose to take her oath with her hands on a stack of banned books that included Night by Elie Wiesel, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Flamer by Henry Holt, and Lily & Dunkin by Donna Gephart, among others.
That’s just about the most fabulous and dare I say classy f**k you to the previous board I can think of. Thanks Karen.
Texas Supreme Court Denies Permission for an Abortion
The Texas Supreme Court denied a woman an abortion on Monday, overturning a district court judge’s decision to allow her to end a pregnancy that would have likely ended in miscarriage or stillbirth anyhow. Though the woman had already left the state to have the procedure when the higher court’s decision came down, this ruling will have implications for future women facing this impossible situation.
Kate Cox is a 31-year-old mother of two who was 20-weeks pregnant when she approached the court. The fetus Kate was carrying had very little chance of making it to the due date and almost none of making it past delivery. While her life was not in imminent danger, she had been in and out of the emergency room during this pregnancy with bleeding. Kate has already had two C-sections, and her doctors believe that carrying this fetus to term could cause health problems and threaten her future fertility.
In a humane state, one that cares about women, children, and families, Kate would have been able to terminate this pregnancy as soon as she found out about the fetal anomaly and then mourn the loss of her baby in peace and privacy. But Kate lives in Texas where neighbors are encouraged to rat on each other, and anyone helping her get an abortion could face criminal penalties.
Working with the Center for Reproductive Justice, Kate petitioned the court to allow her to terminate. Her argument, which she shouldn’t have had to make, was that continuing this pregnancy might prevent her from having a baby in the future. District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble understood: “The idea that Ms. Cox wants desperately to be a parent and this law might actually cause her to lose that ability is shocking and would be a genuine miscarriage of justice.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton felt differently. Within hours of the court’s decision, Paxton released a statement threatening any doctor or hospital that performed Cox’s abortion. It said, “The judge’s orders will not insulate hospitals, doctors, or anyone else, from civil and criminal liability for violating Texas’ abortion laws. This includes first degree felony prosecutions.” Paxton sent similar language in a letter to three area hospitals.
He also filed a motion with the Texas Supreme Court asking them to block the order. His office urged the court to act quickly: “Future criminal and civil proceedings cannot restore the life that is lost if Plaintiffs or their agents proceed to perform and procure an abortion in violation of Texas law.”
That’s not how it f**king works, Ken. This fetus’s life was already lost.
Kate’s baby had full trisomy (also called Edward’s Syndrome or trisomy 18). The first few times I taught Intro to Human Sexuality it was in the Biology Department, so I included lessons on mitosis and meiosis (I had transparencies for the overhead projector and everything). Now I can barely remember which is which, but that’s not important right now. Suffice it to say that we’re each supposed to have 46 chromosomes in two sets of 23 and that one set comes from the sperm and one from the egg. Sometimes, however, sperm and egg cells don’t divide properly, and there are extra chromosomes.
Down’s Syndrome is the result of trisomy 21. Trisomy 18 is far more severe. Almost all of these pregnancies end in miscarriage or stillbirth. Of those pregnancies surviving into the third trimester, nearly 40% don’t survive during labor. Of babies that survive delivery, no more than 10% survive past their first year.
Learning of this kind of fetal anomaly is the thing expectant parents dread most every time they get an ultrasound or other prenatal test. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that Texas found a way to make it even worse.
Putting the full weight of the state’s legal system to go after one woman already in distress is the very definition of punching down, and Ken Paxton should be ashamed of himself. In a filing, the state wrote that Cox didn’t qualify for a medical exemption despite the fact that this pregnancy could threaten her future fertility:
“There are no facts pled which demonstrate that Ms. Cox is at any more of a risk, let alone life-threatening, than the countless women who give birth every day with similar medical histories.”
That’s a disgusting sentence to begin with, and whoever wrote it is missing the point. Most of those countless women with similar medical histories are giving birth to babies that are likely to survive. Their risk calculations are different.
The fact that Ken Paxton and his minions don’t get that is further proof that this isn’t about the babies. It is—and has always been—about controlling women.
I’m truly disgusted that we’ve gotten to a place where we’re making women prostrate themselves in a court of law and public opinion: “Please good sirs might I be spared the trauma of 20 more weeks of pregnancy knowing it will end in tragedy and possibly infertility?” These are grown women who are perfectly capable of making decisions for themselves, and it’s none of our business or Ken Paxton’s.
Should all Texas women of childbearing age change their names to Ofken?
Conservative Couple Under Fire for Threesomes Hypocrisy
I haven’t been writing about Christian Ziegler, the Chairman of the Florida Republican party who has been accused of rape, in part because I agree with him that the situation is complicated and that an accusation is not the same as a conviction. Then I realized who his wife is and what her role is in this saga.
As the story goes, at some point before October Ziegler and his wife had at least one threesome with an unnamed woman he has known for over twenty years. All participants have gone on record saying that was consensual. On October 2nd, Christian arrived at the unnamed woman’s apartment for what was supposed to be another ménage à trois, but he was alone claiming his wife was busy. There is no agreement on what happened next. He says she invited him in for consensual sex (and he videotaped it). She says he came in uninvited and raped her. The Sarasota Police Department is now investigating.
Many of his Republican colleagues—including Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Rick Scott, and the heads of both the Florida House and Senate—don’t want to wait to see what really happened. They want him out but not because they’re suddenly champions of rape victims’ rights, always believe women, or are taking a stand on due process. Consensual or not, the story of a married man having threesomes isn’t a good look on the party of family values.
Which brings us to the wife, Bridget Ziegler, who is… wait for it… a co-founder of Moms for Liberty.
The group rose to prominence by taking on all things “woke” in schools, from critical race theory to Covid precautions. It now has chapters across the country and is working to populate school boards with conservatives (though election day was not great for them). The Southern Poverty Law Center recently named Moms for Liberty an extremist group and likened it to “pro-segregationist parent groups that flourished in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.”
Mrs. Ziegler, who is also a member of the Sarasota School Board, says on her website that she wants to ban critical race theory, prevent all discussion on sexual orientation and gender in the classroom, and keep transgender kids out of sports. She is credited with helping Ron DeSantis craft his “Don’t Say Gay” bill and supports banning books with sexual content.
Not surprisingly, Moms for Liberty has distanced itself from the Zieglers noting that Bridget hasn’t been involved since the early days while not mentioning that Christian spoke at their national summit in July. (Mr. Ziegler’s speech addressed an incident in which an Indiana chapter apologized for quoting Hitler in its promotional materials. Ziegler said one should never apologize in the press, and he is certainly sticking to his own doctrine now.)
GOP hypocrisy around is sex nothing new. It was widely known that a bureaucrat who was in charge of the federal government’s abstinence-only-until-marriage money had a long-term mistress. One-by-one, the men behind the ex-gay movement, who used their own success stories to torture young men, got caught in same-sex flings. Then there are the politicians who oppose abortion rights until the day they knock up their side pieces. The Zieglers are following in the same grand tradition of “do as I say, not as I do.”
Maybe these people are grappling with internal demons that put how they were raised at odds with what they want now. Maybe it’s all a political calculation, and they’ll simply say whatever they think will bring the most power. Maybe there are other forces at play (perhaps the original threesome wasn’t as consensual as Bridget has said it was). At this point, the why hardly matters.
We are all entitled to privacy around our own sex life and none of us should care how many people were in the Ziegler’s marital bed. They lost that privilege, however, when they cared far too much about other people’s sex lives and held themselves up as morally superior while vilifying the LGBTQ community for being anti-family.
I don’t think Christian Ziegler should be fired over an unproven allegation, and I don’t think Bridget should lose her school board seat because some fellow pearl-clutchers are creeped out by a three-way. Still, I’m kind of enjoying watching the two of them get hoisted on their own petard.
Goodbye 2023; Here’s to a Happy Holiday Season
There are so many sad and snarky things that I want to say about 2023, which I think we can all agree was a continuation—if not escalation—of the dumpster fire we’ve been in for far too long. And given that election season has already begun, I can’t say I’m entirely looking forward to 2024. But I’ve promised to give gratitude a try, and I do have many things to be grateful for this year.
In that spirit, I want to thank all of you for reading. Writing this newsletter is fun and often cathartic, and the fact that you all read makes it me truly happy. Thank you and have a great holiday season! See you in the new year.