Government Secrets
What to know: In May, the Austin city council approved “the purchase of new gas generation by a secret vote in executive session,” setting off a firestorm of criticism from open government advocates. In recent years, executive session abuse has become a big and growing problem.
The TPPF take: Voting in secret is incompatible with democratic principles.
“Austin city councilmembers have a duty to tell the public how they voted. To hide this information from the public does a disservice to the principles of trust, transparency, and self-government,” says TPPF’s James Quintero. “Moving forward, the Legislature should tamp down on local governments’ abuse of executive session and force more decisions to be made in the light of day.”
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Masculinity Crisis
What to know: Even the New York Times acknowledges that American society has a masculinity crisis.
The TPPF take: Young men are looking for heroes; we’re giving them villains.
“For a generation, cultural messaging has treated young men as the problem,” says University of the Incarnate Word Professor John Kainer, writing in The Cannon Online. “That framing is not only empirically thin; it is strategically catastrophic. You cannot spend years telling a group of people that they are inherently dangerous and complicit in oppression and then expect them to heed your guidance on healthy masculinity.”
For more on masculinity, Click here.
Extreme Gerrymandering
What to know: We’re in an “age of extreme gerrymandering,” according to the Washington Post.
The TPPF take: The left should celebrate the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that ended racial gerrymandering.
“Majority-minority districts have distorted the promise of the Voting Rights Act from eliminating heinous Jim Crow laws and ensuring everyone has equal access to the polls to demanding that Congressional districts be established with deliberate race consciousness to ensure that African Americans and Hispanics would be elected,” says TPPF’s Sherry Sylvester. “That has resulted in the creation of political ghettos over the past several decades, that segregate black and Hispanic candidates and limit both coalition building and broader electoral competition.”
For more on gerrymandering, Click here.