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‘In the Interest of the State’ takes on big meaning in Texas [1]

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Date: 2022-07-30

It’s only a cheek swab, Fellas!

Texas men like to brag that everything is bigger in Texas. To prove it, the overtly male Texas Legislature (48 women, 132 men) wrote a really big abortion law that constrain women’s medical decisions in a really major way. What Texas men want is bigger families. Not being able to convince the women of Texas that it is in their best interest to do that, has led to this moment. Perhaps things in parts of Texas (men) aren’t as sufficiently large as necessary (like their income....what were y’all thinking?) for a woman to make that decision to co-parent.

When men, with an overwhelming advantage in making the Law, can’t persuade enough women to go along with their idiot plans, they have a second recourse. Men will tell the women that even if it will not be in their best interest, it is most definitely in the Interest of the State.

Interest of the State laws are not all created equally. The State may decide that requiring students to pass competency exams before they graduate to ensure an educated workforce is a good thing, or setting speed limits to reduce deaths on State highways are in the interest of the State. The men of Texas have decided that forced birth to increase the number of available children is in the best interest of the State of Texas.

Cool, let’s run with that.

There are a couple of other things that Texas believes are in its interests, but the one that stands out above all others, the one that has provides a stunning amount of controversy, and spawned a white-supremacist Federal Agency tasked with rounding up the brown people, is protection of its borders. Remember that guy who said Mexico is sending the not good people and specifically mentioned rapists? Remember Governor Abbot saying,

“Rape is a crime, and Texas will work tirelessly to make sure we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them, and prosecuting them and getting them off the streets.”

Tirelessly, aggressively arresting people is usually done by gathering evidence, including who and where that person is, and using that evidence to convict the guilty. Rape kits attempt to recover DNA from the rapist for use in prosecution. The hitch is this - the suspect’s DNA has to be in a searchable database accessible to Law Enforcement. If not, unknown rapists remain at large, and innocent men can be falsely convicted on eyewitness testimony because the case lacks definitive DNA evidence.

If protecting the border and eliminating rapists are in the best interests of Texas, then stopping men at the borders and securing their DNA for a database is also in the State’s best interest. This database would need to include all Texas citizens with the ability to get a female pregnant. But there’s a third reason that the Texas Legislature should consider this - the inevitable cost of approximately 50,000 new babies per year being added to an already over-burdened system.

Texas believes that promoting live birth and empowering families (note that Texas does not appear to recognize single mothers with children as ‘families’) are in its best interests. It does not however, believe it in the State’s best interest to pay for that shit. When it comes to whipping out their big old checkbooks to pay for the kids, Texas guys show themselves to be egregiously tiny men. Texas Medicaid for poor, pregnant women only covers about 53% of those who try to enroll. The obvious solution is to do everything possible to see that the Texas men who make babies are paying for them, and the State incubators to which they’re attached. To insure that the correct man is paying for the correct baby(s), we’ll need....DNA.

This is not a burdensome exercise. In most cases, a simple cheek swab will suffice. At most, a blood draw. Takes minutes - as opposed to pregnancy which takes the majority of a year. It can be done at truck weigh stations, border crossings, and should absolutely occur before the age of 2 for Texas-born males. It’s time for the manly men of Texas to step up and shed some cells for the greater good.

There is low confidence that Texas men will comply. There will be a lot of comments about freedom and how the girls are ho-bags, trapping these helpless fellows into mandatory fatherhood via bank account. Dudes, if you are sticking it in, be prepared to fork out. It’s your responsibility, not the State’s. This is even more critical for pregnancies that require medical interventions for the mother, and postpartum support should the baby be severely ill. Texas would be on the hook for millions, because to abandon a State-mandated pregnancy/baby would be State-sanctioned medical neglect, which could lead to State-approved homicide for critically ill babies.

Just as Governor Abbott has failed to rid his State of the whole pesky rape business, he will also fail at getting his fellow Texas men to admit paternity through DNA. Turns out, the biggest thing about Texas men is their big desire to avoid big responsibility for having sex. And that, aside from their egos, is the only big they’ve got. For the women of Texas, that’s not much of an offer. If the men of Texas really want to prove their bigness, they start by big-time committing big resources in a big way to the mother, and child they created. The first step in that commitment is to build a DNA database in the biggest Texas way possible. Just tell the guys that it’s In the Interest of the State. Because, this time, it actually is.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/30/2113524/--In-the-Interest-of-the-State-takes-on-big-meaning-in-Texas

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