Idiot Texas Judge Outlaws Daycare and Babysitters

This is the kind of suicidal backfire you get when you make legal and public policy decisions based on Bronze-age fables and craven bigotry instead of facts.

Hunger Tallest Palin at Rumproast:

If I haven’t mentioned it before, I’ll say it now, bigots are fucking morons. Exhibit #9826(W) comes to us by way of (surprise) Texas (via TWO):

In a case causing rising controversy in the US, a judge has told a Texan man he cannot leave his children in the care of the man he married.

Inter-state tension continues as the marriage between William Flowers and Jim Evans fails to be properly recognised in the second-largest US state.

Flowers had been married to a woman previously and fathered three children with her before they divorced in 2004. At the time, it was agreed she would keep custody of the children.

Over six years on, in early 2011, Flowers married Jim Evans in Connecticut, and began proceedings to claim custody.

Evans didn’t get custody, but that’s not the problem [I disagree, but no matter. - ed]. The judge in the case has ruled that Evans can’t leave the children with anyone “not related by blood or adoption,” which specifically excludes his husband.

TPM provides more details:

Judge Charley E. Prine, Jr. “issued a ruling which included an injunction applicable only to William. It prohibits him from leaving his children alone with any male to whom the kids are not related by ‘blood* or adoption,’”

But because bigots are fucking idiots, Prine forgot he was also creating a little thing called precedent. At a minimum it creates an opportunity to make divorce and custody proceedings 100% uglier. A former husband can argue that based on this ruling, mom can’t leave the children alone with a new boyfriend. Ditto a new husband until he formally adopts the kids. A former wife can argue that it is discrimination to only apply the ruling to men, and by the way, tell my ex-husband he can’t leave my kids alone with his girlfriend.

And why stop there? Once you argue that children shouldn’t be left alone with non-relatives it’s just a short step to arguing the kids should only be alone with relatives. My advice to parents in Texas: Hire a reputable genealogist and hope like hell you’re at least the 10th cousin twice removed of your babysitter, day care provider, kid’s teachers, football coaches ...

Or you could move to a state where fuckheads don’t run the show.

*Wouldn’t it be hilarious if it turned out Flowers and Evans were distant relatives?

Seriously, the kind of over-the-top stupidity that is now constant in states like Texas and Oklahoma and Kansas is what we used to laugh at in backwards countries like Guatemala and South Africa and India. Countries that are now ahead of the U.S. in measures like student achievement, public health and economic equality.