SFGATE columnist Drew Magary argues that red states' culture war legislation will backfire in the long run.
and generational attachment to states that are now official backwaters. You can’t stop Americans from seeking out greener pastures. Those pastures become much more clearly demarcated when Idaho and Missouri attempt to hold their most vulnerable citizens hostage. The transparency of these efforts should, and likely will, prove their undoing.
In the long term, they’ve essentially cut off their own oxygen supply. As a result, Ukraine may not be the only place that has refugees streaming out of it. Certain blue states, like Vermont, will eventhem to pull the trigger. None of this will necessarily be sudden, but radioactivity of this sort has an awfully long half-life. The only thing that will grow from these bills is a stubborn daydream of leaving them behind.
You’re better off, at this moment, thinking of America not as a country but as an amalgamation of disparate territories overseen by a federal government that, despite its size and expense, isn’t terribly relevant. There’s no real need for Texas to formally secede when it can elect to be legally separated from the rest of us instead. This is the way Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has chosen to do business, and it’s catching on with his peers.
This development makes sense in the modern political realm. It was only natural that the intangible partisan lines that divide Americans would one day evolve into literal boundaries. That day is today, along with many coming days in the near future. It’s colonization of a different sort: existing states so eager to protect the identities of their whitest and male-est citizens that they drive everyone else out.
I live in a blue state. I have many gay family members. I have gay friends. I have gay neighbors. I have Black neighbors. I have Korean neighbors. I have trans friends. I am friends with trans parents. My kids have gay and nonbinary friends. My school teaches kids that slavery was a bad thing. In many ways, but not all of them, I live in an ideal place for kids to grow up, and for parents to raise those kids. You couldn’t f—king pay me to live in Florida or Texas right now.