Watch out, ladies—Republican lawmakers don’t even want to hear you talking about abortion. Take this Republican Texas senator who smashed a glass table while trying to stop a NARAL Pro-Choice Texas intern’s testimony against a bill that limits dilation and evacuation abortion procedures.
According to Cosmopolitan, 24-year-old Maggie Hennessy, the intern, was wrapping up her two-minute testimony against the bill when Sen. Charles Schwertner verbally warned her that she ran out of time.
Hennessy then went several seconds over, to which Schwertner swung his gavel straight onto the glass tabletop, shattering the desk and leaving the room “stunned into silence.”
.@BlakeRocap & @maggie_hennessy up on the first panel of public testimony against #SB8 #SB258 #SB415 #txlege pic.twitter.com/3QxOLro7Sl
— Alexa Garcia-Ditta (@agarciaditta) February 15, 2017
Schwertner hit the table so hard w/ his gavel demanding that our intern stop talking during her testimony that he broke the glass. #txlege pic.twitter.com/2eZmOz0Cq5
— Alexa Garcia-Ditta (@agarciaditta) February 15, 2017
Schwertner gaveled my testimony so hard that this happened… Rattled much? #FightBackTX pic.twitter.com/SZCi8P4Oxi
— Maggie Hennessy (@maggie_hennessy) February 16, 2017
“I don’t know why he banged [the gavel] so aggressively,” Hennessy told the publication. “He just clearly was rattled by it.”
A rep for the state senator told Cosmo that Schwetner didn’t mean to hit the glass—”the reality is he’s got a little gavel block, and he hit the glass instead of hitting the sounder,” according to his chief of staff. The senator, who has supported a number of anti-abortion bills, was just trying “to run an orderly meeting.”
But minutes later, Schwertner, the chair of the Texas State Health and Human Services Committee, reportedly allowed the president of an anti-abortion lobby group to extend his testimony for the same time that Hennessy went over, this time sans glass-smashing. He also only verbally warned others testifying whose statements went over time, and even thanked them after.
The lawmaker’s glass-shattering reaction, however, has only pushed Hennessy to shatter ceilings of her own.
“I’m not scared by it,” she said. “It encourages me to keep fighting this good fight.”
H/T Cosmopolitan.com