Sheila Suess Kennedy: What family planning has meant to women’s liberation
Before the advent of reliable birth control, every sexual encounter carried the risk of pregnancy, and pregnancy generally meant the end of a woman’s economic independence.
Sheila Suess Kennedy
Articles
Sheila Kennedy: Here’s how gerrymandering gives rural voters more influence
Gerrymandering allows the GOP to control state legislatures with supermajorities even when voters prefer Democratic candidates by hundreds of thousands of votes. It thus nullifies elections and insulates lawmakers from democratic accountability.
Sheila Kennedy: Pandemic is example of when identity politics kills
Tribalism has clearly triumphed over logic. The desire to “own the libs” has proved to be more powerful than self-protection.
Sheila Kennedy: Uninformed frenzy over critical race theory is all politics
Assertions that critical race theory is being taught in America’s elementary and high schools are ludicrous. As I have been complaining pretty much forever, schools aren’t even teaching the most basic concepts required for civic literacy.
Sheila Kennedy: Holcomb, Rokita and the radicalization of the GOP
Our ambitious attorney general has cast his lot with those Republicans, who—it must be admitted—are representative of what the Grand Old Party has become.
Sheila Kennedy: Connecting some dots in the hospitality industry
Researchers estimate that the pandemic has cost America 2.5 million restaurant jobs and closed more than 100,000 eateries, so it is worrisome that, just as the nation begins to return to whatever “normal” looks like, so many restaurants that did survive can’t find staffers.
Sheila Kennedy: Here’s how the Senate makes us an undemocratic Republic
Democratic senators represent about 40 million more voters than do Republican senators—a disproportion not reflected in the Senate’s 50/50 split, a split that depends upon Vice President Kamala Harris to wield a tie-breaking vote. And it is likely to get worse.
Sheila Suess Kennedy: How gerrymandering has deepened the urban-rural divide
In a country that is increasingly removed from anything resembling actual democracy, people who live in the nation’s cities have demonstrably less political voice than do their country cousins.
Sheila Suess Kennedy: Don’t use public dollars to create thought ‘bubbles’
Why do our legislators continue sending Hoosier tax dollars to private schools, rather than spending to improve public education?
Sheila Kennedy: Word games prevent honest policy conversations
Today’s linguistic game revolves around “socialism.” If policymakers were really discussing economic systems, rather than using labels to hide their actual motives, they would define their terms.
Sheila Suess Kennedy: Using courts to promote homophobia is so last century
Outgoing Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill wants states to be able to deny married same-sex couples the right to be recognized as parents of their children.
Sheila Kennedy: America is being penny wise and pound foolish
Despite Donald Trump’s sneering disinclination to help “mismanaged blue cities,” the current state and local government financial crisis is a result of the pandemic, not incompetent governance. And this crisis isn’t limited to Democratic jurisdictions.
KENNEDY: We need two parties with workable policy ideas
Political science research tells us that people affiliate with a political party for one of two reasons: They agree with the party’s basic approach to issues of governance, or they identify with the other people in that party.
Sheila Kennedy: Privatizing parking meters is a mistake we’re stuck with
When you contract away your flexibility and your authority to make decisions that are responsive to unforeseen events, you can end up owing a lot of money to the private vendor.
KENNEDY: This is not the time for economic idealogues
Americans’ economic battles are being fought between ideologues who have convinced themselves that their favored economic system is “the” answer to every problem.
Sheila Suess Kennedy: Our hyper-partisan politics can be deadly
In today’s highly polarized America, an individual’s self-identification as Republican or Democrat has come to signify a wide range of attitudes and beliefs not necessarily limited to support for a political party. Affiliation with a political party has made Americans’ increasingly tribal social identities most predictive—and most consequential.
KENNEDY: Is making it easier to vote ‘rigging’ elections?
More citizen participation in the political process is obviously good for democracy. So why is the GOP hysterically claiming—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that encouraging vote-by-mail will enable fraud and “rig” election results?
Sheila Kennedy: Constitutional tax caps limit governments’ response
When Daniels and the Republicans in the Statehouse told Hoosier voters they were “protecting taxpayers” by putting tax caps in the state’s constitution, objections by mayors and warnings by fiscal and tax policy experts were pooh-poohed. Politics won. Prudent and informed policy lost.
Sheila Kennedy: What lessons will we learn from the pandemic?
The most important lesson to be learned by policymakers and plutocrats alike is that fortunate people are secure only when everyone is secure.
Sheila Kennedy: Legislators like to remind us who’s boss
Their most consistent behavior, year after year, is their adamant refusal to allow cities and towns—especially Indianapolis—to do much of anything unless and until our overlords in the Legislature deign to give local elected officials their official blessing.