Repost Roulette: To Ten Commandment, Or Not To Ten Commandment

I have spun the Blog Post Wheel again and stumbled on this one, originally posted December 8, 2011 .....

Some people do not understand Separation Of Church And State though I find it hard to fathom. I mean 'separation', to keep things apart, church and state; to keep church and state apart. Church out of the state, or government  business, and the government out of the church business.


Pretty cut-and-dried, eh?

Not so up in Roanoke, where US District Court Jude Michael Urbanski has declined to dismiss a lawsuit challenging a display of the Ten Commandments at a public school. This is considered an upset for the Giles County school, which hoped the lawsuit over the Ten Commandments display at Narrows High School would end quickly.

It seems, though, that the unnamed student's opinion that allowing the document to be framed and displayed on a school building wall is akin to the United Sates endorsing a religion, one over the other, and is in violation of the law, and the whole shebang is set to go to trial.

Now, to be fair, this is not such a difficult decision. Let me break it down for you:

• If you want your children to be taught the Ten Commandments, send them to church.
• If you want your children to be taught the Ten Commandments, or any religious teachings at all, get them out of public school and send them to a religious school
• Do not subject anyone else, who does not share your religious leanings, or any religious leanings, to your religious leanings.

It's quite simple. I mean, if you want to display the Ten Commandments then display them, but then display documents and passages from every religious text in the world, from every single religion worldwide, and every single non-religious, atheist viewpoint, agnostic viewpoint, I-don't-know-what-I-believe viewpoint on every single wall of every single public, i.e. state, school in the land.

And, maybe it's just me, but I don't think that would go over so well.

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And Now For Something A Little Uplifting

Jordan Addison

After four posts about the idiocy that is the GOP in 2012, I needed to do something to cleanse the ick from my blog, and this story seems perfect:

Jordan Addsion goes to college at Radford University in Radford, Virginia, about an hour or so outside Roanoke, and like most college students, money is tight, and, so when his car was vandalized, three times on-campus and once at home, he struggled with how to pay for it.

He also struggled with the idea that his car was vandalized because he's gay. The first time his car was targeted, there were anti-gay slurs keyed into the car, and another time actual dye was keyed into his car. The slur was written across one side of this car and he tried to everything to cover it but nothing worked.

"The lowest estimate I got just to fix the damage to the doors was like $2,500 and for a college student that's a lot of money," says Addison.

Richard Henegar Jr, and
Richard Henegar Sr.

Richard Henegar, Jr., the manager at Quality Auto Paint andBody--the link is in case you want to go to their website and say Thanks--in Roanoke, heard what happened to Addison: "Once I saw the vandalism that was done to it I said that's uncalled for we're gonna fix your car that's the least we can do."

And he did. He spent nearly 100 hours in the last two weeks working on the car. he gave it a new paint job to hide the offensive language; but he also gave Jordan Addison new tires for his car, and tinted the windows, put in a new stereo and added a security system to it. All told, Richard Henegar put over $10,000 into fixing Jordan's car simple because he thought what had happened was "uncalled for."

But Henegar wasn't the only one footing the bill. There were ten other businesses that helped: Parts Unlimited in Vinton, Advance Auto Parts, Moon's Auto Body, Rice Toyota, Val's Automotive, The Rod Shop, B&C Exterminating, Twists & Turns, AJ's Landscaping, and Sunnybrook Auto Spa.

The new and improved car was unveiled to Addison on Monday.  He was speechless.

So, I wanna give a big ISBL shout out to Richard Henegar and his friends who helped right a wrong, not because the damage done to Jordan's car harmed them personally, but because it was wrong.

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