Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 127, No. 139, Ed. 1 Tuesday, March 14, 2017 Page: 4 of 10
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4 - TUESDAY, MARCH 14, 2017
GAINESVILLE DAILY REGISTER
Opinion
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Preserve openness in Texas
George Will's email address is georgewill@washpost.com.
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YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS
President
Donald Trump
The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania
Ave., Washington, D.C. 20500
www.whitehouse.gov/contact
U.S. Senator
John Cornyn
517 Hart Senate Office Bldg.,
FIRST AMENDMENT: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right
of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
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RI6HT!
Fax: 202-225-3486 http://thornberry.
house.gov
Texas Governor
Greg Abbott
P.O. Box 12428, Austin, TX 78711
512-463-2000, http://gov.texas.gov
State Representative
Drew Springer
non-profits, as they were to GHP. To prevent corruption
and hold these agencies accountable, public oversight of
how they spend money is necessary through the Texas
Public Information Act.
Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, and Rep. Giovanni
Capriglione, R-Southlake, are working together on the
bipartisan issue of protecting the public’s right to know
and each have filed bills to reconstruct what the Texas
Supreme Court dismantled.
Senate Bill 407 and House Bill 792 address the Boeing
decision, while Senate Bill 408 and House Bill 793 address
the Greater Houston Partnership ruling.
The Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas
and other open government advocates are pressing
for additional transparency measures in the
Legislature. One attempts to improve access to
public records stored in private email accounts and
on private electronic devices. Another seeks to
resume access to dates of birth in certain public
records, including crime documents and election
filings, which fosters accuracy and informs the
public. House Bill 2670 and House Bill 2710, respectively,
address these two big issues. Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus
Christi, authored the bills.
Meanwhile, open government supporters are working
to block bills that hinder citizen access to government
information. Many secrecy bills are filed every legislative
session.
The clock is ticking on the time we have to preserve
openness in Texas. The current Legislature meets until
May 29. We should all urge state lawmakers to let the
sunshine in as they do the people’s work.
Kelley Shannon is executive director of the Freedom of Information
Foundation of Texas, a non-profit promoting open government laws and the
First Amendment rights of free speech and press.
Gainesville Mayor
Jim Goldsworthy
Gainesville City Hall, 200 S. Rusk,
Gainesville, TX 76240, 940-665-7777
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Vice President
Mike Pence
Executive Office Building, Washington,
D.C. 20501
vice_president@ whitehouse, gov
Washington, D.C. 20510,
Main: 202-224-2934
Fax: 202-228-2856
www.cornyn.senate.gov
U.S. Senator
Ted Cruz
404 Russell, Washington,
D.C. 20510, Main: 202-224-5922
Fax: 202-228-3398 www.cruz.senate.gov
U.S. Representative
Mac M. Thornberry
2525 Kell Blvd., Wichita Falls, TX, 76308
Main: 202-225-3706
State Senator
Craig Estes
P.O. Box 12068 , Capitol Station
Austin, TX 78711, (512) 463-0124
Cooke County Judge
Jason Brinkley
Cooke County Courthouse, Gainesville,
TX, 76240, 940-668-5435,
jason.brinkley@co.cooke.tx.us
P.O. Box 2910, Austin, TX 78769
512-463-0526,
Gainesville: 940-580-1770
www.house.state.tx.us/ members/
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Send your letter to the editor to editor@
gainesvilleregister.com. All letters are
subject to editing for clarity and length.
One letter per writer will be published
in the same week. All letters must
contain a physical address and daytime
phone number. Only names and
hometown will be published.
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We Texans are fortunate when it comes to access to
government information.
Correction. We were fortunate.
For more than 40 years, Texas’ open records law
was one of the nation’s strongest. The Texas Public
Information Act, originating during a time of scandal in
the early 1970s, presumes all government records are
available to citizens, unless there’s a specific exception
preventing release of the document.
But our modern era of openness shifted dramatically
with two state Supreme Court decisions in 2015 known as
the Boeing ruling and the Greater Houston Partnership
ruling. Both put many government financial records
off limits to citizens. J
If the damage isn’t repaired in this legislative
session, Texas will be way back in the pack
compared with other states’ transparency laws.
Details on the spending of many millions of
dollars in taxpayer money will be secret.
Sadly, the message to citizens will be: “Don’t
bother asking. It’s none of your business.”
As we embark on Sunshine Week, March 12-18, let’s
commit to maintaining Texas’ national standing as a
leading right-to-know state. The free flow of accurate
information has always been important. It’s especially so
in this time of misinformation and fake news.
The so-called Boeing ruling allows all sorts of contracts
the government holds with private businesses to be
sealed from public view. The government or the private
entity simply must claim a record’s release would
lead to a competitive disadvantage — not a decisive
disadvantage, buy any disadvantage.
Do you want to see your school district’s bus or food
service contracts so that you know whether your taxpayer
money is being well spent? Good luck. Already, some of
those basic documents have been ruled unobtainable.
The same has happened to requestors seeking taxi and
ride-sharing company filings with the government. Small
business owners who want to view the winning contracts
awarded by a local community college also have been
thwarted.
In one of the most unbelievable examples, the city of
McAllen refused to reveal how much taxpayer money
it paid entertainer Enrique Iglesias to perform in a city
holiday festival. The Attorney General’s Office, citing
the Boeing court ruling, agreed to the withholding. The
state office has made hundreds of similar closed records
decisions because of the Boeing case.
The Greater Houston Partnership decision prevents
the public from viewing the financial books of non-
profits that are supported by taxpayer money and
act in a government agency fashion. Often, economic
development activities are farmed out to these types of
Kelly Shannon
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Eugenics was a
progressive cause
WASHINGTON — The progressive mob that disrupted
Charles Murray’s appearance last week at Middlebury
College was protesting a 1994 book read by few if any
of the protesters. Some of them denounced “eugenics,”
thereby demonstrating an interesting ignorance: Eugenics
— controlled breeding to improve the heritable traits of
human beings — was a progressive cause.
In “The Bell Curve,” Murray, a social scientist at the
American Enterprise Institute, and his co-author, Harvard
psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein, found worrisome
evidence that American society was becoming “cognitively
stratified,” with an increasingly affluent cognitive elite
and “a deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom
end of the cognitive ability distribution.” They examined
the consensus that, controlling for socioeconomic status
and possible IQ test bias, cognitive ability is somewhat
heritable, that the black/white differential had narrowed,
and that millions of blacks have higher IQs than millions of
whites. The authors were “resolutely agnostic” concerning
the roles of genes and the social environment. They said
that even if there developed unequivocal evidence that
genetics are “part of the story,” there would be “no reason
to treat individuals differently” or to permit government
regulation of procreation.
Middlebury’s mob was probably as ignorant of this as of
the following: Between 1875 and 1925, when eugenics had
many advocates, not all advocates were progressives but
advocates were disproportionately progressives because
eugenics coincided with progressivism’s premises and
agenda.
Progressives rejected the Founders’ natural rights
doctrine and conception of freedom. Progressives said
freedom is not the natural capacity of
individuals whose rights pre-exist
government. Rather, freedom is something
achieved, at different rates and to different
degrees, by different races. Racialism
was then seeking scientific validation,
and Darwinian science had given rise to
“social Darwinism” — belief in the
ascendance of the fittest in the ranking
of races. The progressive theologian
Walter Rauschenbusch argued that with
modern science “we can intelligently mold and guide the
evolution in which we take part.”
Progressivism’s concept of freedom as something
merely latent, and not equally latent, in human beings
dictated rethinking the purpose and scope of government.
Princeton University scholar Thomas C. Leonard, in
his 2016 book “Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics &
American Economics in the Progressive Era,” says
progressives believed that scientific experts should be in
society’s saddle, determining the “human hierarchy” and
appropriate social policies, including eugenics.
Economist Richard T. Ely, a founder of the American
Economic Association and whose students at Johns
Hopkins included Woodrow Wilson, said “God works
through the state,” which must be stern and not
squeamish. Charles Van Hise, president of the University
of Wisconsin, epicenter of intellectual progressivism, said:
“We know enough about eugenics so that if that knowledge
were applied, the defective classes would disappear within
a generation.” Progress, said Ely, then at Wisconsin,
depended on recognizing “that there are certain human
beings who are absolutely unfit, and who should be
prevented from a continuation of their kind.” The mentally
and physically disabled were deemed “defectives.”
In 1902, when Wilson became Princeton’s president, the
final volume of his “A History of the American People”
contrasted “the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe” with
southern and eastern Europeans who had “neither skill
nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence.” In 1907,
Indiana became the first of more than 30 states to enact
forcible sterilization laws. In 1911, now-Gov. Wilson signed
New Jersey’s, which applied to “the hopelessly defective
and criminal classes.” In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court
upheld Virginia’s law, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
saying that in affirming the law requiring the sterilization
of “imbeciles” he was “getting near to the first principle of
real reform.”
At the urging of Robert Yerkes, president of the
American Psychological Association, during World War
I the Army did intelligence testing of conscripts so that
the nation could inventory its human stock as it does
livestock. The Army’s findings influenced Congress’
postwar immigration restrictions and national quotas. Carl
Brigham, a Princeton psychologist, said the Army’s data
demonstrated “the intellectual superiority of our Nordic
group over the Mediterranean, Alpine and Negro groups.”
Progressives derided the Founders as unscientific for
deriving natural rights from what progressives considered
the fiction of a fixed human nature. But they asserted that
races had fixed and importantly different natures calling
for different social policies. Progressives resolved this
contradiction when, like most Americans, they eschewed
racialism — the belief that the races are tidily distinct, each
created independent of all others, each with fixed traits
and capacities. Middlebury’s turbulent progressives should
read Leonard’s book. After they have read Murray’s.
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Armstrong, Mark J. Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 127, No. 139, Ed. 1 Tuesday, March 14, 2017, newspaper, March 14, 2017; Gainesville, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1323928/m1/4/: accessed July 9, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Cooke County Library.