The Sunshine State, The Show Me State, The Garden and Granite States, and so on. Almost every state has a preferred nickname. Texas proudly calls itself the Lone Star State, but I think that the time for that moniker is coming to an end. We are becoming The Bounty Hunter State. I think of it as a New Mand’alore – a haven for bounty hunters.
Texas lawmakers are taking the state to its origins in gunslinging bounty hunters, street shootouts, and posses. It isn’t something new; it is simply more explicit and being codified in the state’s laws.
The Texas fetal heartbeat bill, SB8, is a good example. It forbids the state itself from enforcing the antiabortion law but establishes a mechanism of civil action that allows ordinary citizens to sue anyone they believe has undergone an abortion or helped a person to undergo an abortion. The bounty is $10,000 including legal fees and court costs. This way, the state itself is insulated from federal intervention. I have visions of speculum-slinging abortion bounty hunters monitoring their next-door neighbors in order to make an extra buck from an intrauterine misfortune.
This week, we have another enlightened Texas GOP legislator advocating for citizen enforcement of border controls. Democrats in my state deride this proposed law as a sanction for Citizen Death Squads. I think that this is the way it begins. The state sanctions self-radicalized, anti-immigration groups who then begin to capture undocumented asylum seekers (ostensibly to aid border patrol officers) and then proceed to murder and disappear those who flee from their would-be assailants and captors. I think that Iran and Syria have such citizen groups to break up protests and to enforce their edicts. I know that Latin America’s authoritarian regimes have done similar things.
Texas already has a law that permits fragile white men bearing arms to murder anyone that they find threatening. We call it standing your ground. I expect the Texas legislature to soon sign into law a bill that allows motorists to run down protestors obstructing a roadway using a rationale akin to standing one’s ground.
Texas is devolving into a dystopia based on a glamorization of guns and the wild west. If things get any worse, I may have to buy a 9mm Uzi for self-defense.