GOP wingnuts want a conservative version of Californicating Texas

The Monthly talks about how Tex-ass wingnuts want to pull off a conservative version of Californicating the state. A poster child is SB 8 from two years ago, which allowed private citizens to file lawsuits in abortion-related issues.

Unknown to me until reading that story? The whole idea, though of course with different targets, originated in California far earlier. For example, those carcinogen worries you see on so many products? Required in California — and enforceable by citizen lawsuit. It's easier for companies to print one version of such labels nationwide. Here's the skinny.

If you’ve ever visited the great state of California, you may have experienced that cumulative effect, as well as some alarm at finding out that nearly everything there will give you cancer. Any consumer product or location there that contains any level of a carcinogen, from coffee machines to Disneyland, is required by a 1986 law to display a warning about its potential to cause cancer and birth defects. Because makers of consumer products will invariably want to sell those products in California, many items sold outside the state also contain the warning. And because testing to determine the levels of carcinogens is so expensive, manufacturers may slap warnings on products that don’t contain carcinogens at all, lest they be hit by lawsuits later. Those lawsuits can be brought by enterprising members of the public, just as with SB 8.

Never knew that before.

And beyond wingnut political purity, this stuff has also come to Tex-ass:

There’s a bipartisan consensus that Americans eat like garbage, and that ultra-processed food is at least partly to blame. But Senate Bill 25 is notable for its mechanism of correcting the national appetite. It presents a list of 44 ingredients or categories of ingredients, from dyes to bleached flour, many of which are commonly included in products Texans buy at grocery stores and which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration already regulates. Any product made with one of those 44 elements—pancake mix, tortilla chips, granola bars—now must include a warning on its packaging that it “contains an ingredient that is not recommended for human consumption by the appropriate authority in Australia, Canada, the European Union or the United Kingdom.”

Interesting indeed. (And also highly hypocritical, per the story.)

Here's the bill. It's the "physical education in schools" bill; the food stuff comes later, about halfway down. Before that, it has many other things, like an elective high school course, and a required college course, on food and nutrition. Sounds good, right? But with wingnut promoting Brainworm Bobby's rants about seed oils, maybe it's not.