Perry's 'Texanity' Explained

The nation's leader in abstinence-only education has the third-highest teen pregnancy rate.

By Jim Hightower

Occasionally, we Texans have a responsibility to explain our "Texanity" to befuddled out-of-staters.

For example, you might've heard about Gov. Rick Perry, known for his chronic temper tantrums over Big Bad Government's coercive intrusiveness into people's private affairs. So how then can we explain that this year his top legislative priority is to not cope with the $27-billion budget deficit he's run up, but instead to require that all Texas women facing the gut-wrenching decision of whether to have an abortion must first undergo a state-mandated sonogram.

Yes, Mr. Small Government wants to compel Texas doctors to show an ultrasound image of the fetus to these women, then force them to listen to the fetal heartbeat and sit still for a lecture on fetal development. As a female state senator dryly noted, "[Perry] is going to shrink government until it fits into a woman's uterus."

Gubernatorial hypocrisy? Not at all, insists Perry, who points out that women can avoid his version of big government intrusion simply by choosing not to get pregnant. And you'll be glad to know that he's been super-helpful in preventing unwanted pregnancies by making Texas the nation's number one provider of "abstinence-only" sex education.

Unfortunately, this abstinence-only doctrine has resulted in Texas also having the nation's third highest teen pregnancy rate. Perry is undeterred by inconvenient facts. "Abstinence works," he recently told an interviewer. But, he was asked, what about all those teen pregnancies? "It works," he reiterated. How does he know? "From my own personal life," he explained.

Sure enough, his wife hasn't been noticeably pregnant in more than a couple of decades. So maybe he has been abstaining from sex. That could explain his chronic insanity--or as we call it, Texanity.