Sticks and stones, editorial cartoonist Chris OBrion and gun advocates in today’s letters to the editor.

Pick of the day: Agenda 21 fears painfully laughable

In his Dec. 12 commentary on Agenda 21, a supposed U.N. takeover (“Agenda 21 might control Roanoke Valley’s future”), Bill Gregory writes that nonbelievers like Roanoke County Supervisor Charlotte Moore are somewhere between fighting and laughing.

Never mind that Agenda 21 and the ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) proposes a set of sensible, voluntary and healthy goals, like creating walkable communities, providing public transportation, preserving historic buildings and open space, and other kinds of smart and sustainable growth. A commie plot disguised as bike lanes?

The same John Birch, Heritage Foundation, tea party, Glenn Beckian nonsense helped shoot down a recent treaty before the Senate. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was negotiated by the George H.W. Bush administration and ratified by 126 nations, including China, Russia, Iran and Cuba.

Thirty-eight Senate Republicans saw it as a threat to American “sovereignty,” even though the treaty wouldn’t have required any change to our laws, even while their former majority leader, Robert Dole, sat before them in a wheelchair.

One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

RICK VAN NOY

CHILDRESS