Recent editorials from Texas newspapers

Here are excerpts from recent editorials in Texas newspapers:

The Monitor. Aug. 20, 2017.

With the recent end of the 30-day special session of the Texas Legislature in Austin, we thought it was a good time to reflect on the accomplishments of our elected lawmakers and what they did for the greater good of Texas.

Basically, lawmakers achieved what was necessary and good for the state early on when they passed two bills that allows for the continuation of critical components of state government: the Texas Boards of Medical Examiners; Examiners of Psychologists; Examiners of Marriage and Family Therapists; Examiners of Professional Counselors; and Social Worker Examiners.

Beyond that, the special legislative session was pure political theater - and the worst example of leaders capitulating to a small, but active constituency at the cost of Texas taxpayers overall.

That’s what made the sole contrarian in a leadership position such a standout and that’s why we strongly commend what Texas House Speaker Joe Straus accomplished for the entire state of Texas instead of for a voting bloc that will control the Republican primary next spring.

In a testimony to the upside down nature of governance these days, Straus, a San Antonio Republican, stands out for not allowing legislation to become law.

In this case, the legislation is known as Senate Bill 3 or, to the embarrassment of this state, better known as the bathroom bill.

It was the sole reason for holding a special legislative session at a cost of more than $1 million in taxpayer funds. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who appears hell-bent on saving Texans from a problem that doesn’t seem to exist, forced the special session by not allowing the enabling legislation for the various medical boards to be passed during the regular session earlier this year.

In essence, Patrick took a page from the worst of Washington politics and threatened the closure of key elements of state government, including the board that ensures that our medical doctors are up to the standards to safely practice in Texas.

Perhaps worse was Gov. Greg Abbott giving in to Patrick by allowing the bathroom bill to be a part of the special session, then masking that capitulation by throwing in a slew of other legislative measures to be considered, including controls on women’s health care - all of which whet the voting appetites of conservative primary voters.

Of the leadership triumvirate, only Speaker Straus displayed the political courage to stand up to these forces and he listened to a coalition of business and civil rights interests that decried a bathroom bill would be disastrous for Texas.

Even beyond the political perspective, as a practical matter, the bathroom bill is just a bad idea. As state Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, D-McAllen, has repeatedly said, beyond the prejudiced symbolism of such legislation, how would it be enforced? Would we have needed to create a potty police force?

Ironically, because of his demonstration of courage in this case, Straus now has a target on his back.

Just before the special session convened, for example, the Bexar County Republican Party - a party that is alive and active in great measure because of Straus and his family - voted to denounce their hometown speaker. And conservative activists across the state are calling on someone to challenge the speaker in the Republican primary to unseat him.

What manner of pragmatism is this? Who would want to unseat the most powerful member of the lower chamber of the Texas Legislature for political purposes and at the expense of this person’s governing influence in your district?

That’s the problem of partisan politics overtaking public policy as a primary tool of governance. That’s why Washington no longer seems to work. That’s what Austin had long been able to avoid and why Texas was an economic standout among other states in this country.

Straus is proof that the legacy of Texans such as the late Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock and former Gov. George W. Bush - two men who worked together for the benefit of Texas and in spite of being in opposing political parties - has not been completely lost.

And that is why this state owes a tremendous debt of thanks to Straus for standing up to enormous partisan pressure for the good of our state.

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The Dallas Morning News. Aug. 21, 2017.

We live in an era when diseases that sickened or even killed millions in prior decades should be distant history. But typhus, which modern medicine had essentially eradicated in the U.S., is now rebounding in Texas. And here’s the kicker: Researchers don’t know precisely why. But they need to.

According to Baylor College of Medicine researchers, health authorities reported a tenfold increase in Texas between 2003 and 2013, from about 25 to 222 - and the cases expanded from nine counties to 41, mostly in South Texas. By 2016, the statewide number was up to 364. Before 2007, Harris County reported no typhus infections. Last year, it had 32. Bexar County reported just four cases in 2013, but an astounding 66 last year.

The extent of the problem could be even worse than that, since milder cases may have gone unreported. While generally not life-threatening, it can be fatal if left untreated by antibiotics. At least four typhus deaths occurred during the study.

Typhus (not to be confused with typhoid) was common in the U.S. in the 1940s, when rats and other animals carried fleas and lice infected with strains of a bacterial group called Rickettsia. Widespread use of pesticides largely eliminated the disease to fewer than 100 cases nationwide by the mid-1950s. For some reason, the disease has been far more persistent in South Texas, especially the Rio Grande Valley, and now is returning in numbers that have health officials worried.

The findings, published recently in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, offers some ominous warnings. Unlike many tropical diseases, which predominate in poor areas, the new cases of typhus were just as likely to be reported in more affluent areas. Of more than 1,700 cases, about 60 percent of patients had to be hospitalized, with most exhibiting the symptoms of fever, headache, chills, malaise, anorexia, nausea, vomiting and muscle pain.

Clearly, there needs to be more research into exactly why typhus and other tropical diseases are becoming more prevalent in Texas. In the meantime, the rest of us need to get more educated about the risks and how to avoid infection, which can be transmitted by pets or insect bites.

We live in a hot, humid climate that is conducive to the transmission of some of these diseases, and are the front lines of migration and global trade. Previous research studies into the resurgence of tropical diseases speculate that poverty and poor sanitation may be factors, too.

Modern science defeated typhus in the U.S. once. Now we must rely on it to do so again.

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Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Aug. 21, 2017.

For at least two minutes Monday, Americans pushed their differences aside and shared a non-politicized moment together.

It took an once-in-a-lifetime astrological event, but we will take it as a good sign for things to come.

We loved seeing downtown Fort Worth’s sidewalks filled with people, eager to experience something extraordinary as they clustered on street corners.

There weren’t any arguments about politics or exasperated commentary on current events. It was mainly laughter, solar eclipse questions, telling people not to look at the sun and “Game of Thrones” reactions for a small, yet significant, moment out of a busy day.

As the eclipse hit its peak, strangers shared solar eclipse glasses and huddled around pinhole contraptions to get a glimpse of history.

It was peaceful moment, and we hope the first of many.

The solar eclipse event shows us that unity can exist in this tumultuous year. That we don’t have to be angry all the time and just enjoy people’s company.

We should continue to find more of these moments and savor them.

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Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Aug. 21, 2017.

University of Texas President Greg Fenves showed bold, moral leadership in having three Confederate statues removed from his campus. The deadly clash in Charlottesville, Virginia, over that city’s Robert E. Lee monument precipitated Fenves’ decision. But it was long overdue for UT, which has a responsibility, as one of the world’s leading institutions, to enlighten.

Bold, moral leadership involves risk. And Fenves took a big one. He had statues of generals Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnston and Confederate postmaster John Reagan that had been on the campus since at least the early 1930s taken away without first seeking a self-protective consensus. Inevitably, some if not many will accuse Fenves of cowardice for having the statues removed late at night Sunday and into Monday’s wee hours.

But this was an act of personal courage. UT has many powerful, rich alumni who are likely to take offense at the removal of statues they remember from their undergraduate days. And a UT president answers to the whole state, not just UT alumni.

Predictably, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was quick to condemn Fenves’ action as “erasing our history” - a widespread intellectually bankrupt notion that these memorials served as educational aids of some kind. They did not. It’s a good bet that Lee’s face was the only recognizable one to the generations of UT students who passed these statues hurriedly on their way to classes.

Those statues were not educational. They were celebratory. And what they celebrated was indefensible - treason and oppression. With the passage of time, and in the aftermath of Charlottesville, they came to stand for worse. “These events make it clear, now more than ever,” Fenves said, “that Confederate monuments have become symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism.”

Also, it’s not as if Fenves ordered the statues destroyed. He sent them to the Briscoe Center for American History, where they actually can serve an educational purpose. There, perhaps they can be displayed in proper context - as relics of a sinister attempt to bathe the nation’s ugliest historic chapter in glory.

On that note, we condemn the recent toppling of a Confederate statue in Durham, North Carolina, and any defacing of monuments as vandalism. The statue in Durham could have served the same valuable educational purpose we propose for the three UT statues.

It’s baffling - or should be - that apologists like Patrick, President Donald Trump and prominent UT alumnus Gov. Greg Abbott continue to reject the ugly truth about Confederate monuments. Removing statues “won’t erase our nation’s past, and it doesn’t advance our nation’s future,” Abbott said this month.

We agree with the first part but reject the second. We find it mildly amusing that the first part of Abbott’s statement contradicts the notion parroted by Patrick that removing statues is an assault on history. We suspect that was not what Abbott intended.

And Abbott is way off the mark about the value to future generations of not weighing them down with these stone and metal symbols of hate. Fenves’ action advanced the future by large leaps.

His decision reflects honorably on an institution whose civil rights legacy is not to be envied. Its 1969 football team was the last to win a national championship with all white players. Its refusal in the late 1940s to admit a black law student resulted in the landmark Sweatt v. Painter decision against the separate-but-equal doctrine, a forerunner to the 1954 Brown V. Board of Education decision.

“We do not choose our history,” Fenves said in a prepared statement after the statue removals, “but we choose what we honor and celebrate on our campus.”

He should consider commissioning statues of Heman Sweatt, the plaintiff in Sweatt v. Painter, Sweatt’s attorney Thurgood Marshall, and Julius Whittier, the Longhorn football team’s first black letterman.

Abbott and Patrick should consider the example of leadership set by Fenves - the one they failed to set. They chose stagnation and reinforcement of their constituents’ prejudices and resistance to change. Fenves chose to challenge those prejudices and to advance the future.

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Houston Chronicle. Aug. 21, 2017.

A long running controversy came to a quiet culmination at the University of Texas at Austin on Sunday night as workers removed three Confederate statues from their pedestals on the campus of our state’s flagship university.

The move was a surprise. Only a couple of dozen people watched. A few bystanders argued with each other, but the work attracted no organized protests, no fanfare, no violence. The statues were gone by dawn.

It’s about time. More than a century has passed since a former Confederate officer, Major George W. Littlefield, specified in his will that he wanted life-size likenesses of Confederate war leaders positioned around the campus. As a university task force report noted in 2015, their construction in the early 20th century paralleled the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and an era of discrimination and violence against people of color. Generations of Texas students seeking a higher education have since been subjected to these monuments honoring men who committed an act of treason in defense of slavery. What happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier this month finally provided the impetus for an action that was long overdue.

The statues of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnston as well as Confederate Postmaster John Reagan won’t be destroyed. Instead, they will be moved to the Briscoe Center for American History on campus, the same place where the university decided to move a statue of former Confederate President Jefferson Davis in 2015. That’s an altogether appropriate locale for likenesses of men whose movement was long ago consigned to the dustbin of history.

UT President Greg Fenves has set a fine example that our state’s elected leaders should follow. The Texas Capitol features at least a dozen tributes to the Confederacy, including three large statues prominently displayed on the capitol grounds. We need to have a serious discussion about what Texas should do with these Confederate monuments.

It’s disgraceful that our state lawmakers and other Texans visiting the capitol - especially African-Americans - have had to walk past monuments to a cause that defended slavery. Perhaps the worst of them all is a plaque near the rotunda promoting the preposterous myth that slavery was not the underlying cause of the Civil War, a piece of revisionist history that directly contradicts the state’s declaration of secession. (https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/secession/2feb1861.html)

The University of Texas has led the way. Just as Fenves figured out what to do with those statues at UT, we need to figure out what to do with the tributes to the Confederacy on the grounds of our state capitol.