Wednesday, March 09, 2022

Welcome to Gilead, Idaho

This is what Missouri is reportedly doing (or reportedly not doing; I haven’t seen any statutory language for what the one Rep. in Missouri wants to do).  This is truly totalitarian in its scope.  Anyone who "causes, facilitates, or permits" transportation of a child to another state for transition (transgender) treatments can be liable.  So if you move with your child (i.e., beyond the reach of the state; and by "move" I mean "relocate"), we still have grandma and grandpa; and maybe your friends, your church, anybody who knew why you were moving and didn't stop you.  "Causes" is pretty direct, but "facilitates" or "permits" can reach your employer (if you move out of state but continue to work for the same firm, for example).  "Permits" can reach people who didn't try to stop you, rather similar to "aiding and abetting" a crime by not telling the police you know it's about to happen.  And this is not the civil penalties of the proposed Missouri law; this is a felony, which can imprison you for a term not more than life.

Kind of wondering what a term "more than life" would be, actually.

So, yeah, this is much worse.

There are broad exceptions for medical care necessary to the life of the patient, although surgeries to remove/alter sexual organs (which I understand is rarely, if ever, performed on minors) are specifically excepted from that exception.  But then you get to go to court to raise that affirmative defense.  It doesn't block the investigation and/or prosecution; you still get that nightmare.  Not unlike what's going on in Texas:
In 2016, when Texas tried to stop transgender students from using the bathroom of their choice, there were protests, press conferences and a whole lot of anger directed toward the state’s elected officials.

But one mom tried something different — she invited Attorney General Ken Paxton to have dinner at her house with her 8-year-old transgender son. Amber Briggle told The 19th recently that Paxton and her son washed up together in the bathroom before dinner.

“He turns around and looks and says, ‘This is nice. It’s been a while since I had kids this age,’” Briggle told The 19th.

More than five years later, Paxton has helped set in motion a targeting of families with trans kids unlike anything experts or lawyers say they’ve ever seen — and the Briggles are now caught in the crosshairs.

According to their attorney, they are one of several families who are being investigated for child abuse for providing gender-affirming medical care to their children.

“Raising a transgender child in Texas has been one long political emergency,” they said in a statement provided by their lawyer. “It always seemed like this day would come. Now it has arrived.”

There is, however, an upside, in Texas at least: 

That means, among other things, that the Appeals Court flicked Paxton off like a flea, ruling it didn't have jurisdiction to hear the appeal. I don't have a copy of the order, but I'm assuming they held it was too soon to appeal the ruling. Interlocutory appeals from a TRO are extremely rare and difficult, so I'm not surprised. The court had scheduled a temporary injunction hearing (the necessary follow on to a TRO, which can only be good for 10 days) for Friday. That hearing is back on, and I expect the judge will enjoin Paxton and Abbott from continuing this farce statewide. At that point the 3rd Court of Appeals may hear an appeal, but I don't think it will go in Paxton's favor. I also don't think the Texas Supreme Court (many of its justices are up for re-election this year) will look favorably upon such a political landmine either.
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3 comments:

  1. The Thought Criminal2:49 PM

    One of my Florida cousins has a theory that Florida was bound to go bad because it attracted so many selfish, affluent retired People whose children and grandchildren lived elsewhere so they didn't care about anyone in the state but themselves, I wonder if Idaho isn't a similar phenomenon. I remember reading a lot of complaints about right-wingers from places like California relocating there. I'm old enough to remember when it sent Democrats to Washington. Like South Dakota.

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  2. rustypickup6:50 PM

    You made me go look up the statistics. Florida has the 5th highest median age in the US at 42.4 years, and the 6th smallest percentage of population under 18 at 19.9%. Median age for the US is 38.5 and percent of population under 18 is 22.4%. Idaho has the 6th lowest median age at 36.9 years and the third highest percentage under 18 at 25.5. (No surprise that states with high percentages under 18 would have lower median ages).

    The devil really is in the details. Idaho is 26% Latter Day Saints. LDS families are typically large. So a lot of those children are concentrated in a smaller number of typically very conservative families. (I am careful to say typical. At my previous job a coworker was LDS. He and his wife were Democrats and she got elected to the town board, the first Democrat in almost 100 years). Just for completeness, Florida is .75% LDS.

    Interestingly the state with the highest median age is Maine at 45.1 years, followed by New Hampshire at second highest of 43 years. New England dominates the lowest percentages of under 18 with Vermont (18.1%), Maine(18.5%), New Hampshire (18.7%), Rhode Island (19%) and Massachusetts 19.8%) taking the top 5 over Florida. Vermont and New Hampshire are extremely statistically close, but have very different takes on for example public education. Vermont went to a statewide property tax to equalize the school system funding and generally funds the schools well. New Hampshire puts very little state money into the public schools and leaves it to the towns, which results in very inequitable school funding. (I've come to the conclusion that the NH state motto is really, Fuck you, I got mine, but it's too long to fit on a license plate so we use Live Free or Die instead.) Both states have ever increasing numbers of retirees turning vacation homes into permanent residencies. It will be interesting to see if the two states continue to diverge or converge.

    In honor of our blog host, the median age of Texas is 35.1, fourth lowest, and population under 18 is 25.8, second highest. (LDS is 1.5% of population for completeness)

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  3. The Thought Criminal7:37 AM

    Very interesting statistics. Affluent People tend to treat Maine as a summer colony and don't vote here, older People tend to have their families living in the states, though there are a considerable number of them who move out of the state. The really rich ones go to Florida, some of them say. Paul LaPage swore he was going to stay there when he left but, alas, he's running for Governor again. If the Greens and other assorted nutcases install him again with a minority of the vote, we'll see. The goddamned Maine Constitution ruled that rank-choice-voting for Governor in the general election. I've become extremely skeptical about the virtues of written constitutions the more I read into the problems those create. They would seem to be the enemy of democracy as much as they enable it.

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