Dear Governor Abbott,
I’m writing to let you know how grateful I am that you are so pro-life. I’m speaking, of course, of the recent legislation, Senate Bill 8, which you signed into law with such conviction. You said, during this momentous signing, “Our creator endowed us with the right to life and yet millions of children lose their right to life every year because of abortion.”
Of course, you must be especially pleased with the sly twist of placing the law into the hands of ordinary citizens like me to sue people and agencies who are responsible for the slaughter of these innocent lives.
And since a person doesn’t even have to be connected to any of the parties involved in a case, I am thrilled to let you know that I will be planning on suing my first provider soon! That would be you, Governor Abbott.
Before you so enthusiastically signed House Bill 1327 into law, Texans generally needed to be licensed to carry handguns openly or concealed. Applicants had to submit fingerprints, complete four-to-six hours of training, and pass a written exam and a shooting proficiency test. This new law takes away any oversight of guns and allows anyone to buy any type of gun and countless rounds of ammunition without universal background checks or the need to obtain a permit, and to openly carry loaded, semi-automatic guns in public, you are directly responsible for any death caused by gun violence after September first.
According to the Gun Archive website, the lives of 48 Texans have already been aborted through gun violence this month. To paraphrase your above quote on your beliefs, your creator endowed us with the right to life, and yet countless thousands of people with a clearly defined heartbeat lose their right to life every year, their lives aborted by gun violence.
Of course, some of those whose lives were aborted in the nine short days since this egregious law went into effect already owned their weapons, but I’m willing to bet some were proud new gun-owners. I’m thinking particularly of the 21-year-old who accidentally shot himself in the head while playing around with his gun or, perhaps worse, the 22-year-old who accidentally shot and killed his 23-year-old girlfriend while pulling his bright and shiny gun from the waistband of his pants. And then there’s the other man who accidentally shot himself in the abdomen while cleaning his gun. When the creator endowed us with the right to life, was the right to guns part of the deal? Sounds a little oxymoronic, don’t you think?
What makes these aborted lives even more tragic is that you acted so irresponsibly when you must know how easily people with guns abort lives in your state, unless you’ve forgotten the 2019 massacres in El Paso and Midland-Odessa that left 30 people dead.
You claim we’ve been endowed with the right to life, yet it appears as if its only fetuses that have that claim; once those fetuses actually make their way into the real world, your legislated protection vanishes. As you so brazenly said in February of this year, when laying out your policy priorities, “We need to erect a complete barrier against any government official anywhere from treading on gun rights in Texas.” And, when those unaborted fetuses are given their right to life, are you about to enact a bill to ensure that they are cared and provided for? Does that go along with the endowment? If not, perhaps you can create an endowment for that purpose.
I’m wondering when women will have a complete barrier against any government official in Texas—or anywhere else—from treading on their rights. But it was never about the sanctity of life for you anyway; your record makes that clear.
As a Leader at the New York Society of Ethical Culture, I strongly believe in the worth and dignity of people who actually have a very strong heart beat and thus I believe that by removing all governmental oversight on guns while simultaneously legislating medical decisions that rightly should be made by a woman about her endowed life in consultation with her doctor, you, Governor Abbott, have directly contributed to these aborted lives. You pulled the trigger on that. That blood is on your hands.
Dr. Nori J Rost
Leader, New York Society for Ethical Culture
(Image: Greg Abbott/Facebook)
