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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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Doctors have responded by shying away from the procedures which are most offensive to lawmakers. This is an obvious chilling effect!

Indeed, you've changed my mind about it. If doctors are soldiers, we can note that indeed, soldiers have a harder time dealing with the enemy when overly-restrictive ROE are imposed. Friendlies get hurt, even killed, if you can't deal with cases where it's obvious to the soldier on the ground who the enemy is, but not to the politicians back home.

But then, what is to be done? Establishing a military-style court in the form of review with primacy over the criminal justice system won't fix the problem (soldiers get railroaded all the time there too), doctors (and more importantly, the organizations paying them) don't want to take that risk, and you have a major fraction of the population doing the Queers for Palestine thing about babies (perhaps even literally albeit unintentionally; Jews do tend to become doctors). Maybe a Red state should only employ Red tribe soldiers/doctors so that the kind of cultural clash presented here is minimized, but even that's no guarantee, for the US was Red from 2000-2008 and [as I understand it] the shift to Blue coincided with more restricted ROE simply because the average soldier was Red.

Maybe the best choice, or the only choice, is simply to accept that living in Texas has certain occupational hazards; to accept that the optimal number of doctors prosecuted for questionable abortions is not, and will not, be zero; and to make sure there's still some semblance of a West to run off to when there's no mind left in the nation to be changed about it.