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HTexas teenagers will now be required to obtain parental consent to get birth control at federally funded clinics. In December, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled that Title X, a program that gives free, confidential contraception to anyone who needs it, violates parents’ rights and state and federal law. The ruling, which can be appealed, strikes another blow against Texas women’s reproductive autonomy.

Former Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff has a new gig: college professor. Wolff, who served as the county’s top elected official from 2001 to 2022, will hold the title of University Distinguished Service Professor at St. Mary’s University and will also serve as a non-faculty advisor and lecturer at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

HLast week, San Antonio-area extremist militia This is Texas Freedom Force (TITFF) wasted no time in suggesting without evidence that Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field during a game against the Cincinnati Bengals because of a COVID-19 vaccine. “What are the odds the Covid vaccine played a role in the death of the Buffalo Bills player on the field?” the group’s Twitter account posted shortly after Hamlin collapsed — even though he’s still alive.

Peter Sakai was sworn in as Bexar County judge on New Year’s Day, taking the oath of office in front of 300 friends, family members and well-wishers at the Bexar County Courthouse. The 68-year-old Democrat won the election to replace Nelson Wolff in November, besting Republican Trish DeBerry with 57% of the vote. “I’m going to give it my all,” said Sakai, the first Asian American to serve in the position. — Abe

Asher

YOU SAID IT!

“It’s interesting to watch. But, at some point, everybody in every profession has go to call it quits. There’s a guy there in Congress. Maybe he should look in the mirror and call it quits. But sometimes your ego is so massive, you just can’t do it. … I’m not talking about me, by the way” — San Antonio Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich,

Playing Racial Prop Master with U.S. Rep. Chip Roy

Assclown Alert is a column of opinion, analysis and snark.

Few serious political observers think racial justice is on U.S. Rep. Chip Roy’s radar. After all, the Texas Hill Country Republican was one of just three members of Congress to vote against a bill making lynching a federal hate crime.

Roy explained that he opposed the bill’s “woke agenda,” in case anyone wondered.

But amid California U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s days-long humiliation as he tried to win enough far-right support to become House speaker, Roy positioned his opposition to the bid as a stand for racial diversity in the House.

Early in the process, Roy nominated Black U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds as a potential spoiler for McCarthy’s bid, explaining that electing the Florida Republican would be a history-making move.

In his speech, Roy even threw in a quote from the late Martin Luther King Jr. to show he was truly down.

But, after squeezing more concessions out of McCarthy, Roy and enough of his cronies threw their support behind the California congressman to let him claim his prize. Meanwhile, Donalds, whom Roy called an “old friend” during the nomination, ended up shunted to the side.

In a tweet, U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-Missouri, made it clear she saw through Roy’s bullshit: “FWIW [Byron Donalds] is not a historic candidate for Speaker. He’s a prop.”

In comments reported on by National Public Radio, Bush pointed out that House Republicans showed little interest in promoting Donalds until he could be weaponized against McCarthy.

“To hear Chip Roy stand up and say this is not about color ... it absolutely 100% is, because if you were nominating him on his worth and merit, I think none of us would have been surprised because we would have seen him do leadership things,” she explained.

With Roy’s history as a bomb thrower — from engineering U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s government shutdown when he was the Texas Republican’s chief of staff to trying to adjourn the House rather than let it vote on a Ukraine aid bill — it’s easy to concur that the congressman’s nomination of an “old friend” is just the latest in a long line of assclown stunts. — Sanford Nowlin

Twitter / Chip Roy

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Ahead of a visit to El Paso last week, President Joe Biden announced a new asylum plan that infuriated immigrant-rights advocates. Under the new rules, the White House will immediately begin turning away migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who cross the U.S.-Mexico border without documents, while allowing just 30,000 migrants per month from those countries to enter the U.S. and work legally for up to two years.

The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission has launched an investigation of the Northeast San Antonio bar where Councilman Clayton Perry was reportedly served 14 drinks the night he was allegedly involved in a hit-and-run crash. Surveillance footage captured bartenders at the Evil Olive bar and grill serving Perry the drinks, according to a police affidavit. The bar could lose its liquor license or face fines depending on the outcome of the investigation. A new report by online rental marketplace RentCafe found that San Antonio continues to experience torrid demand in its housing rental market. There are 12 potential tenants looking to rent every rental unit in the city, according to the study’s findings. Researchers also found that 94% of all rental properties in the city were occupied. — Abe Asher

Find more news coverage every day at sacurrent.com

BAD TAKES

Texas prisons’ absurd book bans serve no one, including the society into which inmates return

BY KEVIN SANCHEZ

Editor’s Note: Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.

If you think one of the few upsides of ending up in prison is that you’d be able to catch up on all the reading you failed to find time for while on the outside, think again.

The Marshall Project, a bastion of criminal justice journalism, asked every state prison system for a list of books inmates were prohibited from reading. While just 18 states replied, the resultant list, published last month as a database, comprises 54,000 titles. More than 9,000 of those are banned in Texas’ prisons alone.

The Lone Star State already leads the nation in books yanked off the shelves of school libraries, according to a recent PEN America analysis. But telling someone on death row they’ll never be allowed to read Alex Haley’s Roots represents a new low in petty infantilization. Add to that classic The Color Purple, The Prince of Tides, the prison letters of activist George Jackson, three collections of short stories and poems by Charles Bukowski, one by David Foster Wallace, five novels by Joyce Carol Oates, five by Irvine Welsh, three by John Grisham, two by Mario Puzo, a Gore Vidal, a Ray Bradbury, and even — I shit you not — the Stephen King novella that inspired the Oscar-nominated film The Shawshank Redemption.

Not only can’t Texas convicts read about prison breaks, they also can’t learn to code C++ because of “security concerns,” can’t consult road atlases or almanacs since that could “facilitate an escape” and can’t read about boxing legend Jack Dempsey because they might get pugnacious.

According to Texas officials, The Wit And Wisdom of Archie Bunker is off limits because it includes “racially charged language” (duh), Poker Plays You Can Use “advocates gambling” (double duh) and Clive Barker’s The Great And Secret Show evidently features an act of bestiality, if you needed another reason to not read Clive Barker.

Comedian Richard Pryor’s autobiography, fittingly titled Pryor Convictions, which recounts his tumultuous childhood growing up in a brothel and efforts to overcome drug addiction, is off-limits too — despite how invaluable those life experiences might prove for those struggling to put their own lives back together.

The Lone Star State also prevents prisoners from accessing “sexually explicit” comics by Robert Crumb, Alan Moore and Frank Miller along with graphic art by H.R. Giger or Alejandro Jodorowsky. It also bans a graphic novel about working-class hero Joe Hill — because goodness help us if those with a lot of time on their hands took up drawing. Or labor activism.

And, for the philosophically inclined, there’s no Introducing Nietzsche or Introducing Foucault, lest the “docile bodies” ensnared in the panopticon think too hard.

I even had to inform my own mother that she must avoid committing felonies since two of Danielle Steel’s romances made the list.

Outlawing any depiction of drug use, nudity or violence could effectively censor the bulk of Western literature. No books about dream interpretations are permitted, for example, since those may be sexual in nature. Even books that glamorize the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, from biographies of Jimi Hendrix to Tom Petty to a FAQ book about The Rocky Horror Picture Show are verboten to Texas prisoners.

One wonders who the state-sanctioned smut hunters were that got paid to read through all these books.

Less funny is the fact that the sole justification provided for many of the bans is their portrayals of rape, which applies even to Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will, a stridently feminist critique of rape culture.

Rose Luna, head of the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault, relayed in an op-ed for the Austin American-Statesman, that five of the nation’s 10 most sexually violent prisons in the country are in the Lone Star State. Newsweek magazine, not generally known as a fringe or outlandish publication, credibly called Texas the “prison rape capital of the world.”

Just don’t try reading one of the most impactful books of the 20th century about rape. Because that’s contraband.

Of course, not being free to peruse Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids is the least of most prisoners’ troubles. Though they can’t partake of the works of the Marquis de Sade, they endure sadism on a regular basis. As Bolts magazine Managing Editor Michael Barajas, a former San Antonio Current editor, reported last summer, thanks to a gaping loophole in the 13th Amendment against slavery, “Texas is one of seven states, all in the South, that force people in prison to work but pay them nothing for almost all jobs.”

“The agricultural industries in Texas prisons sometimes even lose money,” Barajas later told the Texas Standard. “I think sometimes the cruelty of the labor is the point.”

So, slave labor is still legal in Texas. But for one of those laborers, after an exhausting unpaid workday, to read an accurate portrait of slavery such as Alex Haley’s Roots violates the rules.

Although it’s tempting to dismiss the absurdity of Texas prisons’ book bans, as “out of sight, out of mind,” remember that 95% of state prisoners ultimately return to society, perhaps to a community near you.

Wouldn’t you rather they at least had the chance to become well-read — and perhaps a better person — while serving their sentence?

Wikimedia Commons / Robert Stringer