Amen.  An upvote can't possibly express my agreement.  It never fails that some state in the South, this time Texas, is held up as an example of some huge population that doesn't know what's good for it leaving aside the entire history of the South (plenty of that being ugly and sad) as wanting to just be left alone.<p>These articles are almost always written by someone without the slightest clue what it's like to live in the South, where people want to just be left alone to handle their own problems.  It's not that they don't understand their best interests.  It's that they'd like to handle them themselves instead of hoping the inept government will fix things.