Pondering this question about Molly Ivins several times a day has become a new hobby of mine since the spectacular Senator from Fort Worth, Wendy Davis, stood up for 13 hours and basically destroyed the Republican Party in Texas. Actually the GOP destroyed itself, but I have a theory on that, one I am sure wonderfully irreverent Molly Ivins, who didn't trust a Good Ole Boy as far as she could throw him, would take kindly to if she were alive today. Just as President Obama was left with a financial mess to clean up, so too will the Texas hard-core, right-wing crowd do their best to set the state back as far as possible so that when the inevitable happens, (and it will happen) and Texas goes blue, they will leave behind a mess the size of, well, Texas.
During the sweltering days of June and July, many women, young and old, across the great state of Texas, and across the United States, have not only been politicized by Senator Davis, we have been asking ourselves, "Where does she find so many great orange outfits?" The idea that, come September, the stadium at University of Texas will regularly fill up with burnt orange, whether those wearing the color support the wonderfully Unruly Mob at the capitol this summer or not, is simply delightful. Molly Ivins would surely be chuckling, imagining all those die-hard college football fans proudly sporting the color of Pro-choice protesters.
Molly would surely welcome the way the Pro-choice-anti-gerrymandering-please-regulate-this-potential-fracking-disaster movement has politicized many young Texas women, and men. This would surely make Molly Ivins smile a big beautiful true Texan smile. These young Texans are seeing Democracy in progress, and the threat to Democracy rearing its head. But there are many women and men we did not see at the capitol this past month, and those are precisely the men and women who most need our attention. They are the mothers and workers and indebted students with two and three jobs, who could not afford to come to Austin and protest, yet their lives, are directly affected by the legislation, which was passed.
The Texas legislators in Austin referred to prayers, God and even their Sunday school classes while signing into law the restrictive anti-choice bill this month, which will hurt the poor more than anyone else. But they did not refer to the over two thousand mentions in the Bible of caring for the poor. Governor Goodhair, as Molly would call him, and his kind, would most likely not recognize Jesus today if they saw him walking down Guadalupe Street in Austin. They'd most likely label him as a burnt orange t-shirt-wearing hippy.
For all its mega churches with helicopter landing pads, which pay no taxes, there is also a lot of hypocrisy in the Lone Star State. Texas is the state which just allowed a man who killed an escort girl who refused to have sex with him and would not return his money, to walk free. All this has been taking place while a very unwelcome and unconvincing Governor Perry was up there in New York, trying to convince gun manufacturers and other companies to move down to Texas. He sold Texas as the place where the taxes are low, and regulations are, well, next to non-existent.
Or as Molly Ivins might have remarked,
'Bless his heart, we sent our very own Ken doll up to invite New Yorkers to move to a state where creationism is taught in Biology class, and yet abstinence is the only sex ed they'll ever receive and we have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country. And then when they move down to Texas and daddy runs off with an escort girl, shoots and kills her for refusing sex, which he has already paid hard-earned money for, well, he won't even have to go to prison!"
I mean what kind of sane New Yorker would want to move to Texas where someone can kill an escort, go to trial and get off, when up in New York, they can just apologize about their escort girl and then run for public office again?
The moral of this story is: Don't Mess with Texas and Don't Mess with Texas Women. Molly Ivins is up there watching, and so is the rest of the world. And by the way New York, we've got the likes of Wendy Davis and the Castro brothers taking on the GOP... and all you have are Spitzer and Weiner? Maybe instead of sending Perry up to bring your companies down to Texas, we should send Davis and the Castro brothers up to New York to teach the Democrats there a thing or two about how to respect women. I'm pretty sure Molly Ivins would approve.