How not to slice a pizza

It happens a thousand times a night in kitchens across America.

The store-bought pepperoni pie comes out of the oven, gets laid on a countertop.  A hand grasps the handle of the pizza-slicing doohickey.  In a few strokes, running from one edge through the pie’s center to the opposite edge, the crust gets divided.  Six or eight slices of roughly equal size, each endowed with its own fair share of pepperoni.

Like this …

 

Properly sliced pepperoni pizza
Image Credit: Brian Shamblen

That’s how your average American cuts up a pepperoni pie: simply and fairly.

Now, let’s look at how the politicians who ruled Harrisburg in 2011 would slice up that same pizza:
 

Drawing of pizza sliced as if it were gerrymandered.
Imagine if you sliced a pizza like Pennsylvania was redistricted. | Image Credit: Rob Tornoe

Clearly, something other than common sense and fairness was guiding the hand that mangled that pie.

Just as something else was guiding the hand that drew up the 2011 Pennsylvania congressional map that the state Supreme Court threw out in January 2018. You know, the one that produced weirdly shaped districts with nicknames such as “Donald Duck Kicking Goofy,” “The Malnourished Hammerhead Shark” and “Casper the Ghost Says Hello.”

Heck, let’s call that “something else” by its proper name:  partisan self-interest.

The question now is whether you want that once again to be the motivation that drives the slicing of Pennsylvania’s pizza pie the next time around, in 2021.

Or do you want the guiding hands to be those of ordinary folks who would bring to the task their common sense and their commitment to  fair play?

Bet you a pizza with the works that we can predict which you’d prefer.

Draw the Lines PA aims to show that Pennsylvania voters are ready, willing and able to slice that pie the right way.

(With thanks to 1812 Productions, Philadelphia's comedy theater, and 1812’s Dave Jadico, from whom this bit was blatantly but gratefully stolen.)