Our government shouldn’t be ashamed of its actions; it should be open. When an open records request is filed it should be fulfilled. Period.

Unfortunately, many state employees disagree and are supporting a closed government.

Fears of people using birth dates as identity theft has inspired Oklahoma Senate Bill 1753 which would remove the birth dates of public employees from the public record.

However, The Oklahoma Public Employees Association has claimed open access to birth dates would put public employees at risk for identity theft. But identity theft requires far more information than a date of birth, thus refusing to give a date of birth would only protect the elderly employees insecure with their age.

The Oklahoman, Oklahoma’s largest newspaper, sent an open records request asking for a list of all state employees and their birthdates so they can confirm their identities. This is common practice for journalists. Without birthdates, we can’t distinguish between two people with the same name.

The Oklahoma Public Employees Association response was to e-mail a “call to action” to its members, to protest the request. This solicited several phone calls and e-mails to The Oklahoman, which violates state ethics rules prohibiting the use of state materials for lobbying purposes.

In a democratic society, government institutions should be an open book on everything. The only reason to not acquiesce requests of this kind would be security reasons.

It seems many Oklahoma lawmakers don’t support the idea of open government.

However, this fails to address the really big question: Why are we debating this? The fact this is being debated is wasting taxpayer time and money. We are in a state with a major budget deficit, extremely polarized wealth, one of the consistently worst education systems in the country, and we have better things to do than discuss the birthdates of our state employees.

This shouldn’t be an issue; state institutions need to be as open as possible, always. The recent behavior of The Oklahoma Public Employees Association is the sort of reactionary behavior that give labor unions a bad name.