If I were a male cowboy-boot-wearing Republican in Texas, I might feel pretty chapped right now by all the attention paid over the last week to the Virginia ultrasound bill. Talk about some limp legislation.
Yesterday those wimps in Virginia voted up a pared-down version that will allow women undergoing abortion to choose between vaginal wand sonograms of their soon-to-be-aborted fetuses and the other kind where they just rub jelly on your belly.
Not in Rick Perry's Texas, by God! When our Legislature passed its own sonogram law last spring, they tricked it up with requirements that virtually force doctors to stick a great big old plastic probe into women before an abortion procedure could proceed.
The Texas Tribune did a good piece a few days ago about how Texas has been unfairly left out of the vaginal-probe limelight. Texas does all the heavy lifting on something like this -- in this case, a better word might be thrusting -- and then gets ignored when some Eastern state like Virginia copycats us.
Even Garnet Coleman, a Democrat from Houston, seemed piqued by the lack of spotlight for the Lone Star State. He told the online news service: "I hate to say this, but in Texas we can fight all day long, but there's a propensity to write us off. They think, 'That's Texas. Texas is a place where those things kinds of things happen.'"
But it's not just that we're Texas. I blame it on Republican men. They did a piss-poor job of marketing their accomplishments. For one thing, they kept poor-mouthing the probe itself, and the probe was, please excuse the phrase, the big thing.
They should have called it something more like the Great Dildo of Government, or, perhaps to capture the actual mood a little better, The Official Texas State Woodie.
When you pare away all of the euphemism and bore down into the true Jungian nature of all these bills, that's what we're really talking about here. Republican men believe that Big Government needs to have a great big old humungous hard-on for all women, especially the slutty poor ones.
Woven deep in the paternalism of these laws is a conviction common among a certain strain of American males that, sure, women will scream their heads off about it at first, but if you just keep jamming it in there, eventually the shrieks of "No! No! No!" will turn to shrieks of "Yes! Yes! Yes!"
We liberal Democrat men are different -- decidedly less constant -- and I can't claim it's entirely because we were born with better morals. I think it comes more from lifetimes of dealing with our own strain of women. Eventually a Democrat man comes to a certainty that screams of "No!" ignored for even a nanosecond will turn into criminal charges, but long before things get to that, those screams may turn into a brass bedside lamp right between the eyes requiring multiple stitches and serious blood loss.
I don't want to get confessional here or anything, but even more than the possibility of a stretch in the pen, it's that thing with the lamp that I might have found ... how to put it? ... deflating. Kind of instantly so. Like, "Hit me with a lamp? Where did the romance go?"
And don't think for a minute ... well, I just want to tell you one thing about this cowboy back in the day ... yeah, man ... because nobody better imply ... well, let's just move on.
Texas Republican men have set a high bar for vaginal probe laws, and Virginia, for all the hoopla, didn't even come close. That thing they passed yesterday was limp, wimped out, soft, shrunken, limp (did I say that already?), pencil-sized version of what the State Government of Texas has got between its legs.
I'm sure Texas Republicans aren't worried about it. They know women in America will come around to the Lone Star Hard eventually, because, you know what? Deep in their hearts, Texas Republican men believe that the gals always really want the bad boy.
