Jason Rollison | Wikimedia Commons

Allow me to draw you a picture of a scene that’s happening more frequently of late.

The setting is a high school gymnasium. It’s crowded with hormone-hopped teens eager for the annual homecoming dance, the first one of each school year.

Also in attendance are wary adults. They are the chaperones. As the lights dim and the deejay starts playing tunes, the chaperones’ eyes begin moving, and their focus sharpens. They’re on the lookout for a style of dance known  as “grinding.”

The best way and most tasteful way to describe it is this: vertical spooning — with the girl facing away from the gy — and lots of below-the-belt gyrations and mandatory touching.

“It’s pretty graphic,” said Salem High School Principal John Hall. “It’s almost a simulation of sex.”

The grinding went over like a lead balloon at the North Cross School homecoming dance Saturday.

A warning from the deejay prompted a minor exodus of students, perhaps as many as one-third of the 120 or so people there. One of them was headmaster Chris Proctor’s 17-year-old son, who sent his dad an unhappy text.

READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.

Rembrandt | Wikimedia Commons

Sectarian prayer at its twice-monthly meetings was once again before the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors Tuesday. And for fans of irony, it was a really great show.

For one thing, the supervisors felt compelled to have their discussions about public prayer in a private session — with an attorney from Liberty University’s Liberty Counsel.

For another, public comments preceding that meeting featured an atheist quoting Jesus. And she made more sense than anyone else in the room.

At least three members of the five-member board — Chairman Richard Flora, R-Hollins; Supervisor Mike Altizer, R-Vinton; and Supervisor Charlotte Moore, I-Clearbrook — would like to avoid a long, drawn-out and potentially expensive lawsuit.

That’s been threatened by some atheists who want the board to halt a practice of opening supervisors’ meetings with sectarian prayer . Previously, that majority seemed willing to change the board’s policy to allow strictly nonsectarian prayer, which would avoid a legal fight.

But two supervisors —- Butch Church, I-Catawba and Ed Elswick, I-Windsor Hills — want to keep some form of sectarian prayer. It was Church who engineered Tuesday’s meeting with Liberty Counsel.

After the executive session, Flora seemed optimistic that by the end of the year, Liberty Counsel could help supervisors craft a prayer policy that’s both constitutional and satisfies each side in the debate.

Maybe he’s correct about that. But Liberty Counsel’s recent record track record in the area of religion and public policy isn’t a stellar one.

READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.

RoCo Supervisor Ed Elswick and former RC Clear chair Nell Boyle

Last year and this year, the Roanoke Tea Party waged a long and so far losing fight against the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors. That concerns the county’s membership in a do-gooder environmental group, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives.

The first casualty in this months-long battle has been the truth. That’s because Tea Partiers have trotted out every ridiculous assertion and eye-rolling conspiracy theory they can invent to argue against ICLEI and the $1,200-a-year membership.

Unfortunately, they’ve won over two of the five members on the Board of Supervisors, Butch Church from the Catawba District and Ed Elswick, who represents Windsor Hills.

Now we have the second casualty. Her name is Nell Boyle and she lives in the Windsor Hills District. Until very recently, she’s served as a volunteer on RC Clear, a 13-member group that includes 10 citizen volunteers. The volunteers are appointed by supervisors, two per district. Read more »

Yanked from Roanoke County middle schools

You may recall that two years ago, the company Five Ponds Press found itself flailing in a sea of embarrassment over clumsy errors and disputed “facts” in history textbooks it sold to Virginia schools.

An eagle-eyed reader from Roanoke County recently spotted yet another error in one of the Connecticut publisher’s corrected editions.

This one puts words in the mouth of Thomas Jefferson, one of the most revered Virginians ever.

The 2010 controversy was over mistakes in first editions of “Our Virginia: Past to Present” and “Our America To 1865.” One was that thousands of black soldiers had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Another was the year that America entered World War I.

It later transpired that the author of both books had gleaned most of the errors from the Internet.

In response, the state board of education ordered a review of all history textbooks. Five Ponds hired professors to comb over and in some cases rewrite its volumes. They replaced the erroneous versions with ones that had historians’ stamp of approval.

The updated version of “Our America” stayed in some Roanoke County middle schools, and elsewhere in the commonwealth.

That book was issued to the reader’s sixth-grade daughter last month. On page 95 he found this quote attributed to Jefferson, our nation’s third president.

“When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.”

That sounds nice and neat, huh? The only problem is, there’s no evidence Jefferson ever wrote or said such a thing. That’s the verdict from leading Jefferson historians. At Monticello.org they’ve devoted an entire Web page to denying it.

READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.

Roanoke County Supervisor Butch Church | The Roanoke Times | File

Pop quiz: What does sectarian prayer before government meetings have in common with efforts to curb greenhouse gases in Roanoke County?

The smart alecks out there might answer that both issues have generated lots of hot air recently before the county Board of Supervisors.

But they’re also great ways to bog down a government in mostly meaningless debate.  Nowhere was that point made better than at the supervisors’ afternoon and evening meetings Tuesday.

At the center of both controversies was Supervisor Butch Church, who represents the Glenvar district. Until recently he chaired the board, and he ought to know better.

READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.

Wikimedia Commons | Enhanced by Dan

Here’s a true story about a small gang of angry atheists, their tin funny bones, and their apparent practice of not bothering to think for themselves.

They first surfaced last October, when I wrote a tongue-in-cheek column about the Giles County School Board and its lawyers from the Liberty Counsel. It lampooned the school board and Liberty Counsel for using gangster-like tactics in court to try to keep the Ten Commandments on the wall at Pearisburg High School.

They were trying to force the “John Doe” student plaintiff to reveal his name publicly, which would expose him to intimidation or worse, as a way to “persuade” him to drop his lawsuit against the hanging commandments. (It didn’t work, thank goodness).

On the other side of that issue was the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a group of nonbelievers based in Wisconsin. Somebody at the FFRF evidently believed the column poked fun at the FFRF, when it was actually aimed at the other side.

Via an email to a lengthy list of atheist adherents, the FFRF issued a figurative fatwah on your truly. It claimed I was a member of the religious right (now that’s a laugh) and that I had impugned them.

The next thing I knew, I got blitzed with nasty messages and comments on my blog, calling me all kinds of names. Read more »

Brett Lider | Wikimedia Commons | Text added by Dan

I love that headline above. It’s on a blog post about yours truly, out there on the interwebs somewhere, where a bunch of humorless crank nonbelievers are highly irritated by last Thursday’s column.

Granted, it wasn’t the greatest column in the world. It was aimed at the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors and all the hand-wringing they’re doing over opening their meetings with sectarian prayer.

The goal was to point out that that all the board is doing, by generating publicity over this, is HELPING an outfit of nonbelievers raise more money and grow in influence. Had the Giles County School Board and Pittsylvania County Board of acceded to reasonable requests to halt sectarian influence in government, the whole issue would have gone away. That’s what Roanoke City Council did years ago.

Instead, the RoCo Board of Supes are acting in a manner to help the Freedom From Religion Foundation raise money. A friend of mine in Roanoke County who is an atheist joined the FFRF after the story broke.

But I came at it from a sideways perspective, which is a risky thing. Humor is a risky thing, too, as Ed Brayton (the ex-stand-up comedian who wrote the blog post) might be able to testify. He quit stand-up because he was tired of explaining his jokes to people who were too dumb to appreciate them. Or so he writes.

I won’t be quitting. But I probably won’t be entering this one in any journalism awards competition (such as for the national award I won in column-writing this year). And I’m not going to lose any sleep over it either.

To me, lacking a sense of humor is a worse character flaw than believing in a deity. And if you want to see examples of the former, just look at some of the emails they’ve sent me after the jump. Ha!

From: pj matzig
Sent: Monday, July 30, 2012 3:58:18 PM
To: Dan Casey
Subject: Dumb
Just read your idiotic screed. Have any evidence to back up your fantasies or was that whole imagined conversation just childish wish fulfillment?

—————————————–

From: Susan Fleming
Sent: Monday, July 30, 2012 12:11:24 AM
To: Dan Casey
Subject: Don’t you understand separation of church and state?

Mr. Casey,

I take umberage to your column of Thursday, July 26, 2012.  I was reared among strong Judeo-Christian religious teachings.  But I was also reared to understand the need for the separation of church and state.  To have a state controlled governmental marriage among our religious traditions does nothing but evoke mental images of Nazi Germany leading up to and including the atrocities of World War II.

I doubt you would find many persons of any religious persuasion, or even among those lacking such conviction, who would not agree that the morals as placed down in the Ten Commandments are ideals to aspire to.  Of course they are.  Without such mores we would encounter lawlessness of a wholesale degree, of that there can be no doubt.

But one can live these tenets in society without having them posted in governmental buildings or in public schools.  The key here is that these are public institutions and public buildings.

There are very strong reasons for the separation of church and state.  If you do not agree I suggest you read up on The Federalist Papers published in 1787.  Our founding fathers understood the opression that can result from so much co-mingling.  It s time we remind our selves that government is government and church is church and never the twain shall meet.

Susan K Fleming
Matthews, NC

————————————

From: Ruth Walker
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2012 7:59:09 PM
To: Letters (The Roanoke Times)
Cc: Carole Tarrant; Michael Stowe; Debbie Meade; Dan Casey
Subject: Letter to the Editor
Auto forwarded by a Rule

Perhaps Dan Casey should stick to writing about what he can observe in Roanoke, as it is obvious from the wild speculation in his July 26th column, Atheists likely thrive off Southwest Virginia, that he cannot see Wisconsin from his office.

Many of us believe that work to uphold the Constitution of the United States is very important.  Please consider publishing what their staff attorney wrote while speculating right back on Dan.  ffrf.org/news/blog/let-your-imagination-run-wild

From: Ruth Walker
CEDAR FALLS, IOWA

——————————————-
From: Ed Brayton

From: Frances
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2012 12:21:30 PM
To: Dan Casey
Subject: You are a pig

And probably an evil catholic

——————————-

Generic board meeting | Aeryn | Wikimedia Commons

Somewhere in an office building in Madison, Wis., the directors of the Freedom From Religion Foundation hold strategy meetings.

Let’s imagine some of the discussions they’ve been having in the last few years about religion and public life in Southwest Virginia.

“Next we’ll hear from the atheist in charge of  the Blue Ridge mountains area. Lucifer — er, I meant Luke — can you give us a status report?

“Happy to, madam chairwoman,” says Luke.

“As you know, we’ve been in a fierce court battle with the Giles County School Board over the hanging of the Ten Commandments in their high school. That’s been going on for about 18 months now.

“First the local churches got everyone riled up to keep the commandments. So we sued, and the board tried to ‘out’ the unnamed student  plaintiff in the case. But a federal judge ruled the student could remain anonymous , so he wouldn’t get or teased or beat up or have his house egged. Read more »

Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, address the crowd Saturday at a VCDL picnic in Roanoke County's Green Hill Park. | Shot by Dan

More than 100 folks turned out for the Virginia Citizen’s Defense League picnic Saturday afternoon and evening in Green Hill park, including yours truly and Zach.

The intermittent downpour started almost as soon as folks gathered — fortunately they had arranged a shelter (although the volunteers who cooked got soaked in the rain).

There was no shortage of welcoming and friendly folks there, almost all of them carrying .45-caliber, .40-caliber and .357-caliber (and other sized) pistols.

VCDL President Philip Van Cleave (his photo is on the left) made the trip from Chesterfield, and Al Steed Jr., a VCDL board member who lives in Bedford, was there too.

The best part was getting to meet regulars on this blog, such as Dave Hicks and John Wilburn and the regular who goes by “Jack” (photos of all of us are below). VT Hokie, her husband and daughter were also there. She seemed surprised to see me.

They’re all nice and intelligent folks and it was fun breaking bread with them. They even introduced me, and gave a round of applause.

The purpose of the picnic was to demonstrate that carrying guns Roanoke County parks is legal, in spite of a clumsily worded law that might lead many people to believe otherwise. The law bans firearms “as expressly prohibited by law” but because there’s no law that expressly prohibits them (for most people), they’re not actually banned. Or something like that. Read more »

Brent Riley (left) and Chris Barlow along a stretch of Back Creek along U.S. 221 in Southwest Roanoke County that they're eyeing as a future park.

If you travel south on U.S. 221 with any regularity, you’re well aware of scars on the southwest Roanoke County landscape from the huge road-straightening project just south of Cave Spring.

Some residents of the area see those considerable changes as an opportunity to launch the Roanoke Valley’s next big greenway project.

They envision 5.5miles of bike lanes and paved paths connecting Cave Spring Middle School with the new South County Library in the Penn Forest neighborhood, an area that has nothing like that now.

In one respect, that’s a long-term dream, because building bike lanes and paved paths usually happens at a pace that makes a tortoise look like an Olympic sprinter.

But the centerpiece and linchpin of the prospective greenway is a plot of land that may be within shorter-term reach. It’s along a stretch of Back Creek right around the infamous (and soon-to-be history) U.S. 221 S-curves, just north of Cotton Hill Road.

Chris Barlow and Brent Riley, two southwest county residents who’ve been quietly devising this plan for more than a year, took me on a tour of that section Tuesday.

What I saw just below the existing road was a sun-dotted and largely pristine stretch of creek that’s a world away from cars whizzing just 60 or so feet above.

There, beneath towering trees and amid an undergrowth that includes honeysuckle, mint and wild garlic mustard, shallow waters gurgle gently through the rock-strewn creek bed.

“It’s like our little Back Creek wilderness,” Barlow said.

READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.

Another section of Back Creek that has future park potential, just north of the photo above.