Texas Lawmaker Wants Docs to Sonogram Men’s Assholes
A man’s right to know
We live in a golden age of sarcastic laws. Over the past decade, conservative lawmakers across the United States have passed anti-abortion laws under the guise of protecting women’s health and ensuring religious freedom. These new laws aren’t meant to limit abortions, the legislators claim, they’re meant to protect women’s health.
Right.
Texas, my precious home state, is a pioneer of such evil, fucked-up abortion regulations. Back in 2013, House Bill 2 passed and enforced such heavy restrictions on abortion clinics that only five facilities in the state met its standards. Thankfully, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the legislation three years later.
That didn’t stop Austin from coming up with a whole new plan to force grieving and frightened parents to bury miscarried and aborted fetuses.
Organized groups have long fought against the bullshit abortion laws in Texas and now one legislator has filed a bill to restrict men’s reproductive rights. House Bill 4260 is a sarcastic mirror of House Bill 2 from 2013. The slim four pages call for regulations on masturbation, a 24-hour waiting period before vasectomies and an unpleasant anal inspection before a doc can dole out viagra.
It’s symbolic … but still hilarious.
“A lot of people find the bill funny,” Texas state representative Jessica Farrar, a Houston Democrat, told My San Antonio. “What’s not funny are the obstacles that Texas women face every day, that were placed there by legislatures making it very difficult for them to access healthcare.”
She calls the bill the Man’s Right to Know Act. “The purpose of this [law] is to express the state’s interest in promoting men’s health,” the bill reads. “Ensure Texas men experience safe and healthy elective vasectomies, Viagra utilizations, colonoscopies procedures and men’s health experiences; ensure a doctor’s right to invoke their personal, moralistic or religious beliefs in refusing to perform an elective vasectomy or prescribe Viagra; and promote fully-abstinent sexual relations or occasional masturbatory emissions inside healthcare and medical facilities, as a means of the healthiest way to ensure men’s health.”
My favorite part is Sec.A173.008.AA — the hospital masturbatory assistance registry, which explains that “the department must establish and maintain a registry of private nonprofit organizations and hospitals that register with the department to provide fully-abstinent encouragement counseling, supervising physicians for masturbatory emissions, and storage for the semen. Costs will be absorbed by the hospital or contributing private nonprofits.”
Texas is a de-facto abstinence-only-education state. Around 60 percent of the public schools only teach abstinence during sex ed. Worse, a full quarter of the public schools have no sexual education whatsoever. It’s no surprise then, that Texas has one of the highest teen birth rates in the country. Former governor and current secretary of energy Rick Perry famously stumbled when a journalist pointed this out to him.
Farrar’s bill forces Texas lawmakers to face the hypocrisy of teaching abstinence in schools while restricting abortions and allowing men free reign to pop Viagra and get vasectomies. According to the bill, every sperm is sacred and the state should punish those who spill their seed.
“Emissions outside of a woman’s vagina, or created outside of a health or medical facility, will be charged a $100 civil penalty for each emission, and will be considered an act against an unborn child, and failing to preserve the sanctity of life,” it reads. Texas is just looking out for the unborn.
Texas also wants to keep men’s health safe, which is why Farrar’s proposed bill includes language that forces men to get a nice rectal examination if they want boner pills or an elective surgery. “An attending physician must administer a medically-unnecessary digital rectal exam and magnetic resonance imagining of the rectum before administering an elective vasectomy or colonoscopy procedure or prescribing Viagra.”
With men dominating the Texas State House, there’s little chance the bill will pass, but that’s beside the point. HB 4260 is a symbolic act of defiance against a group of crusty assholes who think they know what’s best for women.
It’s also not a new tactic. Farrar joins a recent tradition of women lawmakers filing sarcastic bills aimed at forcing conservative lawmakers to face their hypocrisy. The last wave of these came out around 2012 and ’13, after local lawmakers passed a bevy of horrendous anti-abortion legislation.
In Oklahoma, Senate Bill 1433 sought to grant personhood rights to every fetus in the state, beginning at the moment of conception. Constance Johnson, an Oklahoma City Democrat, filed an amendment to the bill that would also render sperm sacred. “However, any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child,” her amendment read.
Legislators in Delaware asked for a law to prevent men from destroying their semen. In Illinois, a lawmaker proposed legislation that would force men to watch a “horrific video” about the side-effects of Viagra before a doctor could prescribe it. In Virginia, Sen. Janet Howell, a Democrat, attached an amendment to a ultrasound bill requiring rectal screening for men before getting the little blue boner pill. Anal insertion is a popular theme in these mocking bits of law.
And why not? What’s good for the gander is good for the goose and women have had to put up with a lot of intrusive bullshit. Male legislators should pay attention to these joke laws, practice a little empathy and pray they don’t pass.
It would be just terrible if doctors and lawmakers treated the dudes the same way they treat the ladies.
Stay defiant.
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