Virginia General Assembly Is In Session

...And it opened yesterday, my first day back in town, and I didn't make the time to post anything. I've not even read my men's bills yet. I had cherished an idealistic hope that, given the proposed gun regulations and the number of people who can be counted on to oppose those, this would be another quiet year when the General Assembly could get along just fine without us bloggers nipping at their heels.

No such luck.

Once again, this web site is officially following and praying for three men (yes, all of them are husbands and fathers) in the General Assembly. Fellow Virginians, I know some of you can do this too; it's a safe, friendly way to engage with the process. Christian women, specifically, join a project called "Encourage a Legislator," which sends out postcards expressly for the purpose of sharing non-political encouraging words with a Delegate or State Senator other than your own. This person is not there to represent you, so you can't tell him or her how to vote; you just pray for the person, that s/he will be blessed with wisdom and courage and good health and so on, and let the person know that Christians across the state are watching him or her.

Out here on the point of Virginia, this web site is represented by Delegate Terry Kilgore (House District 1) and State Senator Todd Pillion (Senate District 40). Links for them should work if you're in Virginia, and should track which part of Virginia you're in.

Delegate Kilgore of Gate City has been representing us, or at the very least our Republican majority, quite well for many years. While the bills he's proposed this year are (I note with great relief) of more concern to other people than they are to me, legislators' commendations of their constituents are always fun to read... http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?201+mbr+H56C .

Fiscal conservatives's eyebrows may rise when they read the bill of which he's listed as a chief co-patron. It doesn't raise taxes, but it does allow local governments to raise taxes. I will forward concerns from readers in other districts if they are expressed in a parliamentary way. None of us is getting any younger and the General Assembly always guarantees sufficient stress at best.

About Senator Pillion of Abingdon, so far, I can say that he's been very "conservative" in spending money to file proposed legislation: http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?201+mbr+S111 .

The object of this web site's special concern this year is Delegate Ronnie Campbell of Raphine. Reading his collected works at http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?201+mbr+H309C is likely to motivate this web site's original primary readership to pray earnestly for him. Notable for its unacceptibility to all True Greens and Libertarians is his proposal to allow local jurisdictions to order people who don't even live in cities to "mow grass and weeds."

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?201+ful+HB875

Hello? Most of Virginia is not flat land, and you do not ever want to see mown grass on a steep slope. Mowing grass on a steep slope...

* guarantees erosion

* promotes the growth of the invasive nuisance called Bermuda grass (and other things prohibited under this web site's contract)

* encourages the unwary to build new dependencies on poisons like glyphosate and dicamba, not to mention "fertilizers" that can build up to toxic excess, and ultimately replace lovely native plants with more Spanish Needles, Johnson grass, and kudzu

* makes it more difficult for glyphosate-sensitive people to find and cultivate survival food in their back yards, which is certainly what's keeping me alive at this point, when nearly all commercially grown fruit and vegetables are poisoned

* disproportionately increases the burden of land ownership on the elderly and on young working parents, to no particular gain for anybody

* reduces much-needed biodiversity and "wild" land

* promotes un-neighborly meddling and petty personal harassment

* and also looks ugly...we don't need more Astroturf!

Am I ever praying that God will add an extra boost to the amount of wisdom the General Assembly should share with this gentleman, by killing this bill. (He proposed a similar bill last year. They killed it.)

I think we need a ban on any local requirements that anybody maintain a "mown lawn" even in a city. Native plants are much better. I don't know that we need to empower government to ban the bad habit of monocropping for Bermuda grass to maintain that Astroturf look, but we certainly don't need to tolerate any encouragement of this practice.

Long-term readers will remember the intensity with which Americans rejected the foreign-born land-grab proposal known as "Agenda 21." The United Nations disowned this agenda, but that in no way prevents people who supported it from insinuating little tendrils of it, like those first little sprouts of poison ivy in early spring, back into the edges of even Republicans' philosophical "lawns."

Their proposals sound so reasonable. So nice.

Scott County unanimously opposed the whole idea of a local zoning ordinance, ten years ago, because we opposed the kind of discrimination against low-income families that is involved in things like banning trailer houses. (Remember, "Agenda 21" was all about promoting all kinds of bans and regulations that would force all but the richest to give up owning private homes and land, allowing greedheads to take over large amounts of real estate whose owners refuse to sell it.) Our county board of supervisors assured us that nothing in the ordinance would keep anyone from putting a trailer house on their rental property and renting it out.

Yet, with some dismay, I already hear of people on town councils giving in to what sounds like a harmless reasonable proposal to boost town and city incomes by...banning trailer houses.

"But the reason why these people want trailer houses is that they don't have to pay property taxes on them." Once trailer houses are set up as permanent residences, not in camps but on privately owned land, what in existing state law prevents them from being taxed in the same way other houses are? Not that I think we need more taxes on more kinds of property; I think we need more frugal budgets. But the people who are really interested in land grabs don't want to think about removing a tax loophole that might be discouraging people from improving their trailer houses. Their real goal is to put more people out of their homes!

I already hear of people on town councils wanting to segregate "high-end" from midrange or minimum-investment businesses.

"But high-end businesses generate more profit and pay more taxes and allow cities to do more for the people." Maybe so, but do the people really need higher taxes to enable more dependency, or do they need more encouragement to keep themselves off welfare through low-investment businesses?

In Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, we learned the hard way about gun bans, and we also learned the hard way about how those nicely-nice proposals to yuppify neighborhoods create what I've always hoped would remain a unique kind of homelessness. We need to be vigilant about allowing this kind of ideas to spread into Virginia. One of Montgomery County, Maryland, is all...is probably more than all the world needs.

Maybe what we really need is legislation to establish a Free Enterprise, American Way, zone including all of Virginia under one nice, clear, simple rule: If you own land, you have no right to use it in a way that does harm to other people--which would include putting a chemical plant in the middle of a residential suburb, or keeping hogs in a pen adjacent to a restaurant. But those other people have no right to object to anything you do with that land that does not materially harm them.

Under that kind of clearheaded legislation, neighbors could petition a city government to impose a fine on people who fail to allow native plants to displace any lingering messes of Bermuda grass, or who persist in spraying the kudzu their "weed killers" have nurtured with things whose vapors kill songbirds--but they could not complain about native plants. Or trailer houses. Or the colors of other people's paint...I suppose Reston has a right to exist somewhere, but I'm not at all sure that it ought ever to have existed in Virginia.

Remembering that Agenda 21 also called for Delegate Campbell's and my generation to die younger than we grew up expecting we would, I urge Virginia's Republicans to be as vigilant about these sneaky little appeals to whatever little furtive traces of greed and snobbery they possess, as they are about the attention-grabbing gun ban. Not that gun bans are a safe experiment, as far as human lives are concerned. But land-grabbing is not a safe experiment either. 

Those who choose are welcome to join my prayer for the Virginia General Assembly for 2020:

Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon You, and we beg the blessing of Your guidance to preserve our common wealth from the influence of malevolent patrons who gamble on our shortsightedness.

Help our elected representatives to remember, always, that individual freedom and accountability only to You are ideals that have served us well in this world, while European notions about "gentility," dependency on government, and concern for appearance had destructive effects on all those who succumbed to them.

We ask Your particular blessing on Delegate Campbell, who is not a young man but is new to the General Assembly, and on Delegate Kilgore, whom You have placed in a position to guide and correct him.