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A county’s official faith

Washington County’s supervisors voted this week — unanimously — to hang the Ten Commandments in the Government Center Building in Abingdon. They also voted to form a committee “to look into the legal implications of such a move,” the Bristol Herald Courier reports. …

Just as the wheels were ready to come off . . .

For 25 years, pro-business Virginia Free has rated state legislators on how they voted on bills most important to its members. The more lawmakers’ votes lined up with the interests of business, the higher their score. This year, it came down to how each voted on a single bill: H.B. 2313, Gov. Bob McDonnell’s landmark transportation funding initiative. …

Most favored gifting status

Del. Kathy Byron’s Facebook friends knew she traveled to Taiwan last year since the country “is an important trading partner with Virginia.” She shared that message, too, with constituents on her email list. …

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by Glenn Rose

It’s a good thing automobiles weren’t invented when the Constitution of the United States was being written. Our Founding Fathers may have felt compelled to add an amendment outlining the horseless carriage’s place in our society. It might have read, “While recognizing these contraptions are unreliable and most likely a passing fad, the right of the people to own and operate Automobiles shall not be infringed.”

No doubt we would now have another N.R.A., the National Right to Automobiles, resisting any laws to regulate and control the use of motorized vehicles, now far more pervasive in our society, far more powerful, and far more lethal than in their infancy.

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Rose is a former educator, broadcaster, and business owner living in Rockbridge County.

The Elm Avenue bottleneck and the weeds along Virginia 419 in today’s letters to the editor.

Franklin County supervisors got it right

As a Franklin County resident who has to pay the “small price” in higher taxes that the editors seem so concerned about (“Shame on Franklin County supervisors,” April 28):

Forthwith, print a chart of school salaries plus benefits and real estate taxes with contributions from counties to school boards (with state contributions) from all contiguous counties. This is urgent! The schools will perish and the counties will fail without an immediate cash infusion.

Predominately farm areas, the counties have many acres taxed. Even at a lower rate, citing the extra $20 increase for a $100,000 home is disingenuous.

Among the other shaming insults directed at our stellar board of supervisors, which cut the school board an extra $1 million this year, is a suggestion kids will be promoted unable to read from grade school (without sports and governor’s school cash). The latter two are very important, but aren’t the main objectives of education any more than schools are the main objective of a county.

Kids are guaranteed a free basic education, so parents who want extra for their children should step up and pay extra. Cash-strapped? Consider the rest of us.

C.E. TOWNSEND III

PENHOOK

At this time it is still almost axiomatic that quite a number of pedagogues are inclined to consider the whole world as their classroom and will continue to examine and give homework to any casual strangers that happen to cross their paths.

What’s on your mind this weekend?

The Philadelphia doctor’s clinic is a sign of what is to come if legitimate and safe abortions become inaccessible.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell delivered live babies and killed them. These were not legal abortions. They were infanticides, no question.

A Philadelphia jury convicted Gosnell this week of first-degree murder, infanticide and racketeering, among other charges. It was a just verdict. He agreed to forgo an appeal in exchange for a life sentence rather than face the possibility of getting the death penalty.

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Associated Press

Leaders could have used a quilt to inspire a conversation on race relations.

Martinsville City Council has decided to carry on as if the whole patchwork quilt controversy never flared.

Too bad. A group of fine students will lose an opportunity to broaden their minds by seeing their world through different eyes. And, at best, the city now will slip into polite silence between black and white on matters of race.

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by Bob Crawford

Contrary to the claims central to much of the argument of the pro-gun lobby, the right to bear arms, as provided by the Constitution’s Second Amendment, is not absolute in the sense of disallowing any regulating or limiting conditions.

With any right, limitations apply at the point where one right meets competing demands of another right.

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Crawford is an artist and writer living in Roanoke County.

Roanoke City Council pay, Bedford County Supervisor Annie Pollard and Amtrak to Roanoke in today’s letters to the editor.

On becoming ‘Mom’

It was so much fun to read the respectful yet hilarious tribute to Mom in The Roanoke Times for Mother’s Day (“They became their mom when . . . ,” May 11); I could relate to every word.

I chuckled as I was taken down memory lane and could hear Mom calling the roll to get to the right child’s name. My name came first, then on down to my brother, the youngest. He said many times that he hated being called “Mary Doug.”

And those bread bags — I laughed as I recalled this picture of bread bags neatly arranged minus their ugly, unnecessary tails. Felix Unger would have been proud of us.

When we were impatient, we often heard, “You’re like a worm in hot ashes!” How many times have I used that one?

The heavyweight pocketbook was where Mom kept her whole filing system. Now it works for me.

Thank you for giving us a time to laugh and lovingly reflect on days past. I’d like to think that when I’m gone, some of my words of wisdom will resound in the hearts of my children. Of course, most of them will come from my generation past. And that’s OK.

DEE WEEKS

CHRISTIANSBURG

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Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth — to see it like it is, and tell it like it is — to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth.

What’s on your mind today?

Charles Steger

Through triumph and tragedy, Charles Steger kept Tech pointed toward excellence.

Charles Steger earned three degrees from Virginia Tech and devoted most of his professional life to his alma mater, working tirelessly to push it into the top tier of the nation’s elite universities. When he steps down in the next year as Tech’s 15th president, he will leave a voluminous legacy that includes major academic and research advances, a significant expansion of the university’s footprint, and the darkest days in the history of the Blacksburg campus.

Steger moved into the president’s office at the dawn of a new millennium and moved Tech on a path toward elevating its research enterprise and redefining its land-grant mission for a rapidly changing economy. Since 2000, the university has increased its research portfolio by more than 300 percent. It has established seven centralized research institutes, positioning the school to win large-scale research grants.

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