Of all the eye-popping responses to the Supreme Court’s bombshell decision to overturn Roe v. Wade on Friday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s was among the most extreme.
The ultra-conservative Paxton said he’d be celebrating the removal of women’s rights by shutting down every attorney general’s office from noon and making June 24 an annual holiday for his staff. Dubbing it “Sanctity of Life” day, he called the holiday a “memorial” to “almost 70 million babies who have been killed in the womb.”
Paxton did not, notably, do the same when an 18-year-old killed 19 children and two teachers last month at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
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Elsewhere, anti-abortion proponents popped champagne bottles in front of the Supreme Court and crowed on Fox News about it being a “wonderful day.”
The conservative-majority Supreme Court ruled Friday that the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 was wrong and Americans do not have the constitutional right to an abortion.
“The authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the 6-3 majority opinion.
Paxton celebrated the fact that the question of abortion was returned to the states. “And Texas has answered that question: abortion is illegal here,” he said.
Texas is one of 13 states to have a so-called trigger law in place so that once the Supreme Court overturned Roe, abortion could be banned immediately.
Read it at Austin American-Statesman
