MAGites won’t stop until stopped
Your regular reminder: State legislative races matter.
The war MAGA Republicans are waging is not simply cultural, not simply rhetorical, but potentially deadly.
Ruth Madievsky reminds Salon readers:
The right’s escalating culture war — with vigorous attacks on abortion and gender-affirming care for minors — incurs ever-evolving collateral damage. In recent months, conservative lawmakers have introduced legislation centered on banning books with LGBTQ+ content, obstructing transgender care in both minors and adults, and removing nationwide access to mifepristone—one of the drugs used to manage both medical abortion and early miscarriage. Recent events suggest that the newest casualty in these battles may be access to HIV care.
On Thursday, a federal judge appointed by George W. Bush struck down a key provision of the Affordable Care Act requiring health insurance companies to cover PrEP, the highly effective drugs used for HIV prevention. The Texas judge found that this section of the 2010 law could no longer be enforced against employers because “compulsory coverage for those services violates their religious beliefs by making them complicit in facilitating homosexual behavior, drug use, and sexual activity outside of marriage between one man and one woman.” The ruling could severely restrict access to an indispensable medication that is already underutilized due to race-based healthcare disparities, prohibitive costs, and physician under-prescribing, among other factors.
We are all in this together cannot be overemphasized. Conservative lawmakers are on a roll and mean to run the table on legislation aimed at disfavored minorities. All of them.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, Madievsky writes, rejected “all $8.3 million in federal funds earmarked for HIV prevention in the state” rather than see “just $10,000 in annual CDC funding go toward the volunteer-run Transgender Task Force—which provides HIV services to transgender individuals.”
Madievsky warns:
Lest you think this is a Tennessee-specific issue, allow me to restate that federal funding for HIV care is often funneled through organizations that support gender-affirming care for minors and abortion. Planned Parenthood of Tennessee, for example, is another organization the Lee administration is pulling funding from, despite the state already having one of the most draconian abortion bans in the country. Planned Parenthood of Tennessee no longer provides abortions. But their association with reproductive choice is undesirable enough for the governor to kneecap their HIV preventative services entirely.
Currently, 38 states are pursuing anti-trans legislation, 21 of them focused on bans of gender-affirming care for minors. 24 states have outlawed or are likely to outlaw abortion, and five states have signed bills to defund Planned Parenthood. Anti-trans legislation has advanced across several states in just the last few weeks, including the Kentucky House and Senate overturning the governor’s veto on a sweeping anti-trans bill, the Idaho House passing a bill that criminalizes gender-affirming minor care, Texas introducing a bill banning state funding for transgender care in Texans of any age. And on March 2, Gov. Lee signed into law a ban on gender-affirming care for Tennessee minors, which will require them to detransition by March 2024. States with Democratic governors are less likely to face these particular challenges, but where does that leave the 26 states governed by Republicans? The right-wing obsession with restricting abortion and transgender services for minors—and what this will mean for HIV care—is a national issue that should raise alarm bells.
The attacks on individual liberties, on health care, and on democratic governance are coming from inside the house. Your state houses, the “Laboratories of Autocracy.” Serious damage is happening close to home. It is a tactical blunder for the left to focus too much attention on federal races. Republicans and their billionaire-funded PACs don’t.
As early as October 2016, I warned that President Hillary couldn’t stop what was happening in state legislatures. President Bernie couldn’t either. You have to fix that.