AUSTIN — Today Governor Greg Abbott announced that he would convene a special session of the Texas legislature on July 18, 2017. The agenda for the special session includes school vouchers, the anti-transgender “bathroom bill” and multiple restrictions on abortion access.
“Lt. Gov. Patrick held the must-pass sunset bill hostage in order to advance his extremist agenda, and today Gov. Abbott paid the ransom,” said Terri Burke, executive director of the ACLU of Texas. “Taken together, the special session’s agenda items constitute an assault on Texas’s most persecuted communities—on women, on schoolchildren, on transgender kids. But there’s a reason this discriminatory legislation didn’t pass during the regular session: Texans don’t want it. And when legislators return to Austin on July 18, they should expect to meet stiff resistance not only from the ACLU, but from every Texan who believes everyone deserves a fair shot rather than a government running roughshod over our civil liberties.”
