Yelp sues Texas to defend its labeling of crisis pregnancy centers | CNN Business::Yelp is suing Texas to ensure it can continue to tell users that crisis pregnancy centers listed on its site do not provide abortions or abortion referrals, opening a new front in the fight between states and the tech industry over abortion restrictions.
Isn’t abortion severely constrained in Texas right now? How can the state possibly complain about this label when they are actively trying to limit abortions? And how can the centers complain about it when it’s factually true across the board?
Yelp’s prior label (which the State also complained about) was:
“typically provid[ing] limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite.”
And while that also seems broadly accurate, all it takes is for Yelp to apply this label to the few centers that do have medical professionals on site to make the label misleading at those centers.
This would funnel people away from anti-abortion practitioners and locations. They don’t want that, they WANT you to come in and be talked down to by a ‘Family Planner’. They want people to come into the church run clinics.
I understand all that. What I don’t understand is the legal basis for the State’s lawsuit contending that simply stating these places don’t provide abortion services is deceptive, when abortion services are extremely hard to get in the state in the first place. (I mean, other than the obvious cynical motive of the AG harassing companies he doesn’t like for political points, but not even he would admit that in court.)
It seems to me that Yelp’s pre-emptive legal action is really an attempt to get the adjudication of this matter out of Texas entirely.
The legal basis for the State of Texas’s lawsuit is that it was filed by hard-right Republicans and they’re hoping to get a hard-right Republican judge who agrees with their Handmaid’s Tale worldview.
This basically.
The state legislature passes a illegal, unconstitutional law. Or they just start enforcing a previous law in a new novel way. It takes months to years to decades for that to work through the courts for the court to say no that’s illegal you can’t do that. And then they do it again. Being told no is not the problem, it’s the years of enforcement before they can be told no.
They are winning, constructively, cuz the day-to-day lives of people in the affected areas is impacted.
They’re winning for now.
Push a people too far though, and you’re going to get a reaction. If you remove all legal recourse, people will seek illegal recourse, as the fourth “box of liberty” fairly directly implies that it’s perfectly defensible to shoot bitch-ass motherfuckers who are ignoring and/or intentionally undermining the (small-d) democratic process.
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