It never ceases to amaze me that the people who plan these websites use run of the mill hosting providers like GoDaddy. I use Godaddy myself for some tiny websites that I manage for customers but for this? I wonder if they had a backup plan.
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Just in:
Things are still fucked, though.
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Dear Greta-
I love you so much. Thanks for being an awesome human being that kicks ass.
Yours forever-
Mindysan33
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What’s stopping, say, thousands upon thousands of like-minded Texans all suing the governor for aiding abortions? The law sounds so broad, what level of evidence needs to be cleared so they aren’t thrown out? If it’s a hearsay situation surely just asserting the Governor assisted with an abortion would mean they could push forward? And no penalty if they fail.
Sue every member of the Texas legislature that voted yes on this, thousands and thousands and thousands of times.
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Would you care to name a legal system that doesn’t have this problem when the judiciary ignores clearly written law? Law only exists insofar as those with power choose to enforce it.
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What clearly written law? The whole problem with for example abortion, marriage rights, and gun control in the US is that such clearly, unambiguously black letter law does not exist.
Go read Roe v. Wade. It is page after page after page of dense legalese, side tracking to even Roman and English law to argue a text says what it does not say! Others can play that game too, you know?
And that is my continuous warning! Don’t trust in rights given by courts that are not enforced in written lawa! Courts can’t give you that, you have a congress for that.
Now I am not a huge fan of my local (Dutch) abortion laws either but at least they exist with clearly stated conditions and rules that I can quote and refer to without the kind of inventive apologetics that can argue up is down and black is white.
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What this comes down to is that someone coming from a civil law tradition (you and me) can’t quite understand the appeal of a common law system where everything is just based on precedent and every law can be circumvented if you just argue cleverly enough. I personally prefer having a law that I can look up myself as a layperson and that clearly states what is and isn’t allowed; especially because ignorance of the law famously doesn’t protect from prosecution.
That said, theirs is the system they have, so saying it should be more like ours unfortunately doesn’t help a single woman in Texas.
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This so much.
It sure as hell would be nice to have a legal system that was clear, unambiguous, and very fair. But the only people who are content to try to overthrow the US gov to implement a new constitution and legal system are the GQP and somehow I don’t think that would be a good development for most of the citizenry.
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Once again, when you leave all matters of civil rights in the hands of the legislature then you end up in a situation where only politically popular groups have civil rights.
Do you think there was enough nationwide popular support to push through a Constitutional Amendment protecting interracial marriage in 1967? Same-sex marriage in 2015? Miranda rights for suspected criminals in 1966? Desegregated schools in 1954? Guaranteed access to abortions in 1973?
Hell, we probably couldn’t even get any of those things done via Constitutional Amendment today.
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14th Amendment to the US Constitution: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The key point is that last one: equal protection of the laws. If there is a law that denies a right to women but not to men, then that law is in violation of the 14A. It’s the basis for Title IX, EEO, and so many of the rights we currently enjoy. How is that not clear?
Just because you had to wade through all the legal wrangling, doesn’t mean that the basis isn’t obvious. Producing reams of arguments is what lawyers and judges do. Don’t let that get in the way.
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while i love that, i guess it also indicates they have enough money they don’t need to nickle and dime the drivers they employ
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Hail Satan!
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Good on Uber and Lyft.
Of course it goes without saying that if Texans tried to enact a law that held drivers responsible for transporting young men to parties where those men went on to commit acts of sexual assault then the law would have been a non-starter.
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Lol, did they think about that?! Hah!!
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I am convinced that a huge portion of written law is deliberately written to be ambiguous. That way it’s
a) much more easy for those in power to selectively enforce it, so it does not apply to them and theirs, only to others, and
b) they can argue that “law X would not affect Y, it only applies against Z” when passing it, but then turn around and apply it against Y later, or at least make it clear that it might apply to Y, in order to prevent people from doing Y out of fear. because Y was always their real target, and Z was just an excuse.
The whole point is to make it impossible for the average Joe to know what they can, or cannot, legally do ahead of time. It’s all up to the whim of the police and judges to determine afterwards.
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I think we do need to demand an explicit constitutional right to privacy, whether it is currently implied or not.
Maybe you’ll take it from a different source…
" Congress never secured the right in statute, and relied on a supreme court precedent for nearly five decades. Social conservatives took a different tack, and over the same period passed more than 1,300 abortion restrictions, challenging Roe again and again and again.
“Roe v Wade is a husk, a desiccated dry husk of a ruling at this point,” said Anu Kumar, the CEO of Ipas, a US-based reproductive rights organization whose work focuses on helping women internationally obtain access to abortion. “If this Texas law did not trigger the supreme court to intervene, then we all need to be very concerned about what will.”
Who? Women? Should we “accept” our subjugation?
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