re: #2 lawhawk

So much for snitches get stiches.

In Texas, snitches get $10k and bounties for snitching on people they think had an abortion. No proof necessary to launch investigations or anything.

Yeah, what could possibly go wrong here, other than I don’t know, saying that Abbott and Paxton spouses both had abortions and someone needs to investigate what happened and why they’re covering up their own malfeasance?

Given how this is supposed to be “policed” by people, but ultimately state courts and authorities are involved, this gives state action to back up the law. That’s a roundabout method to shred the rule of law and should be ruled unconstitutional. It’s encouraging vigilantism.

Okay, these points are all valid if you assume a baseline of Amercian civil liberty as encoded in the Constitution….but the core premise of the Republican Party and American “conservatives” is that the state exists only to wield force in aid of their cultural positions against the non-compliant.

If you fill in the blanks from their perspective, the hazards aren’t hazards.

For example…this law will not be enforced in ways that disrupt existing hierarchies, so snitching against someone of a high Republican caste will not produce the same response from the state as snitching on someone deemed out-caste or untouchable.

That this law will periodically cause pain and suffering to loyal and compliant members of the caste system is a win, because the general rule that the lesser must bear the cruelty of the greater is more important than any particular assertion about the limits of state action.

And vigilantism isn’t vigilantism if you believe that society has a class that is inherently entitled to be cruel and use lethal force, so long as they do so against the classes that are viewed as inherently suspect and threatening.

Every time it seems like they’re hypocrites or the thing they’re doing is incoherent, it’s because in their minds the distinction—they are the real people entitled to total deference, the rest of us get what right they grant moment to moment—is just left unstated because most of them know that their core belief is not just anti-democratic but anti-social.