Head of Texas Department of Safety Needs Removed after Vaginagate on Texas Highways

Advice to women planning a trip by vehicle to The Lone Star State of Texas -- don't travel alone or with another woman -- only travel with a man in the car

Texas Highway Patrol has sunk to a new low - Governor Perry needs to replace the head of the department like yesterday.  First it was deplorable actions at the State Capitol during debate on their egregious abortion bill.  Now women are subjected to body searches in traffic stops.  Texas is leading the Country now in being anti-women yanking it away from North Carolina.   Is this what having a state turn hard right looks like.  Pretty soon all those companies with jobs Perry loves to brag about are going to think twice before relocating to the State of Texas.  Looks like the swagger of Texas men has gone over the top with the latest:

Texas Police Pull Over Three Women And Search Their Vaginas For Marijuana 

BY IAN MILLHISER ON AUGUST 5, 2013 AT 5:00 PM 

A pair of videos posted online show police probing the genitals and anal regions of three women they claim to suspect of possessing marijuana. In one video, a woman is seen bent over and grimacing as an off camera police officer conducts the search. Shortly before this search, a male officer explains to the woman that he is calling a female officer over “because I ain’t about to get up close and personal with your woman areas.” 

The videos depict two vehicle stops, one for speeding and another for littering. In both videos, a male officer asks the women if they have any marijuana in the vehicle, suggesting that the purpose of their search is to find evidence of this drug. At one point, immediately before conducting her search of a woman’s genitals, a female officer warns the woman that if she “hid something in there, we’re going to find it.”

These searches almost certainly violate the Constitution. Although police do have broad latitude to search a vehicle when they have probable cause to believe that they will uncover contraband within, it is quite a stretch to extend these precedents to this most intimate of searches. As the Supreme Court explained in a 2009 decision regarding a student who was strip searched by school administrators, “both subjective and reasonable societal expectations of personal privacy support the treatment of such a search as categorically distinct, requiring distinct elements of justification on the part of school authorities for going beyond a search of outer clothing and belongings.”

Read More at Think Progress

Texas couldn't even complete a Mission Statement for the Texas Highway Patrol:

The mission of the Highway Patrol Service is:

• To secure and maintain order in traffic on highways of assigned responsibility within existing regulations to make the use of those highways safe and expeditious;
• To educate the citizens of Texas in matters of public safety, crime prevention and detection and law observance; and  (? - my question mark)

What is with the hard right white males - they think rape rarelyy exists except in rare instances and now believe that cops have a right to to a body cavity search on women.  What I want to know why the women highway patrol were fired and not the men.

Texas is turning out to be a State out of control thanks to the hard right who has now taken over with Attorney General Abbott, Governor Perry and Lt Governor Dewhurst trying to outdo each other to be hard right.

Time for Texas to turn blue and oust the hard right Tea Party from office as they don't reflect the values of most Texans who are as appalled about this as the rest of us are.