The Virginia-Pilot Monday published three editorials on taxes. The first put the “no new taxes” argument in perspective.

A few days back, the U.S. Census bureau reported that state taxes in Virginia went up $147 on average last year. Even so, Virginia fell from 29th to 31st among its sister states in per capita collections by state government.

The Tax Foundation’s figures are even more telling since they combine state and local levies and report them as a percentage of personal wealth. As a function of ability to pay taxes, Virginia’s burden was 35th lowest in the nation last year.

The Tax Foundation predicts the ranking will rise just one notch, to 34th, in 2005, even with last year’s tax increase in place for the full year.

As the campaign season wears on, voters should beware of candidates spouting false claims about high taxes. Virginia’s goal should be the lowest possible taxes to provide good schools, safe neighborhoods and a decent transportation system.

Right now, by national standards, Virginians aren’t being overcharged for what they get.

And the Pilot cite two jurisdictions that are finding little resistance to higher property taxes. A vast majority of the people testifying at a Suffolk public hearing supported higher salaries for fire fighters, police and teachers.

In Portsmouth, the city council increased spending for schools with funds raised through higher house assessments. The Pilot credits taxpayers who have been “remarkably quiet about the big jump in taxes.”

Same could be said of the entire state, yet the media will continue to give legs to the manufactured anti-tax furor. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised, given the general conservative bias of the mainstream media.

If I want more freedom, I guess I’d be better off in Henrico County. A few years ago as a group I was affiliated with was trying to lobby the school board for faster funding of our high school’s renovation, we had to seek permission to put information in flyers that were taken home in the kids’ backpacks. We’d often run into resistance, as school officials were afraid of being supportive of a political effort.

But in Henrico, a church can advertise in school flyers, and the school system abets a charade by obfuscating the fact that it’s a church.

Laura Kreisa knew the YMCA, the PTA, the JCC. She couldn’t pinpoint WEAG.

She became curious about the acronym when her son came home from his western Henrico County school with a flier advertising a golf event sponsored by WEAG.

She saw no full name, no contact information.

Confused, Kreisa thought it may stand for some West End athletic group.

“I had no clue,” she said. “I was looking in the phone book for WEAG.”

She asked school staff and was told the letters stood for West End Assembly of God, a church in western Henrico.

“The way it’s presented, it’s not clear it’s a church,” Kreisa said. “I would feel better if they are straightforward. Any organization should be fully identified, whether it’s religious or not.”

That was last year. So Kreisa was surprised to see the acronym again last month when her son brought home a flier advertising an extreme dodgeball league. The flier still did not spell out the name.

So it’s a golf event. If her son is an elementary school child, the event clearly was not for him or his classmates.

“We allow the YMCA to use the acronym, we allow the JCC to use the acronym, and there are some people in Richmond, in the West End especially, that recognize the WEAG acronym,” said Marianne McGhee, Henrico schools’ director of public information and television services.

Causing confusion about the acronym was unintentional, said David Mercer, executive pastor at West End Assembly of God. WEAG shows up on school fliers most likely because the material is the same that they use in house, he said.

“It’s nothing clandestine by any means,” he said.

“It’s simply an acronym that we’ve come to identify ourselves by in our internal communications here.”

Oh, and we should know that!

This may be innocent as I know little about the church. But let’s be at least clear when we’re advertising a religious-related event in a public school flyer.

The Washington Post editorial page also thinks Potts just might benefit from the frustration people have over the tenor of the governor’s race.

COULD ANYTHING be less central to this year’s gubernatorial election in Virginia than the twang and timbre of one of the candidate’s voices? Yet, somehow, the race between the two major contenders has degenerated into a venomous little exchange over the accent of former attorney general Jerry W. Kilgore, a Republican from the hill country of southwest Virginia, and his campaign’s insistence (despite slim evidence) that Democratic Lt. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine is impugning it. If the two candidates sorely wish to encourage a protest vote for a maverick third-party challenger — in this case state Sen. H. Russell Potts Jr. (R-Winchester), who is likely to appear on the ballot as an independent — they need only persist in this vein for a few more months.

UPDATE: Roanoke Times mocks Kilgore’s twang strategy.

OK. Melanie Scarborough may have a point.

As the only state other than New Jersey that will elect a governor this year, Virginia is being watched by the nation’s politicians and pundits as a testing ground for Democrats’ latest strategy: courting Republican voters by embracing religion while assuring Democrats that such convictions don’t matter. This is a peculiar position, as the gubernatorial candidacy of Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine (D) demonstrates.

For instance, Kaine says that his Catholic faith leads him to oppose both abortion and the death penalty but that he would not, as governor, try to thwart either practice. Why not?

Kaine’s opposition to the death penalty dates from his days as a law student. What sort of person spends his adult life campaigning against the death penalty, but — if given the power to commute death sentences — would decline to use it?

Either Kaine’s beliefs are not strongly held, or he is being disingenuous.

She goes on to criticize Gov. Mark Warner for saying he wouldn’t raise taxes during the 2001 campaign, but then she returns to Kaine.

Will the real Tim Kaine please stand up?

The gubernatorial candidate seems to want to appease both camps on social issues as well. When running for lieutenant governor, his campaign literature heralded him as pro-choice. Now Kaine says he is antiabortion — but would not interfere with abortion rights.

During the 2001 campaign Kaine supported “civil benefits” for gay couples; now he says he doesn’t favor civil unions or gay marriage. Does that distinction have a difference?

A professional acquaintance I hardly know shared some of her political views this morning. She’s definitely a Democrat, but Kaine’s waffling sent her into apoplexy. I suspect she’s not alone.

What emerged from several dozen conversations was a deep pessimism about the coming campaign. Most said they have little faith that any of the politicians running for the state’s top job will deal seriously with the issues they care about. They said they crave candor, straight talk and honesty but are not expecting to get it.

“I’m sick and tired of the mudslinging,” said Ginger Branton, director of Tazewell’s Chamber of Commerce. “I want to hear what’s important to me, not made-up stuff on other people.”

Many of the those interviewed expressed skepticism about proposals by both major-party candidates to rein in homeowner taxes. “If there’s a proposal to decrease taxes, the question is: ‘And then what?’ ” said Norris, a board member of the Kingstowne homeowner association near Springfield. ” ‘I’m going to decrease taxes here, but I’m going to raise them over here.’ “

These opinions “emerged” from one of The Washington Post’s talking tours, where they talk to a few folks around the state and try to divine a mood of the electorate but wind up tripping over themselves.

Bill Kelehar has heard the radio ads for weeks now. Democrat Timothy M. Kaine and Republican Jerry W. Kilgore — each proclaiming throughout southern Virginia to be religious men, guided by the Christian faith. He’s tired of it already.

A plant manager at a South Boston flag manufacturer, Kelehar is a religious man, a born-again Baptist. But he grimaces over the radio spots.

“All they are after is the Southern Baptist, religious, God-fearing vote,” he said. “They don’t think we have enough sense down here to know anything about roads or taxes and about any of that stuff.”

But wait!

And [Crystal Brown of Suffolk] said the candidates for governor would be wise to talk more about their commitment to religion and faith.

“You can be governor and you can do whatever, but a lot of times you have to step back and say, a lot of things are not possible without your Lord and savior,” Brown said. “You have got to have some kind of strength. You have got to have it from somewhere. You are not just going to get it from your title.”

If this round-up piece is at all accurate, I think the best you can say about the two gubernatorial candidates is that they’re running scared — scared of being called anti-faith, a hillbilly, a tax and spender, a liberal, and, it seems, a leader. Scarborough, of course, confines her criticisms to Kaine.

He served honorably both as city council member and lieutenant governor. But those roles drew on his talent for collegiality; a governor has to lead. And before deciding whether they trust him to do that, Virginians need to know exactly where Kaine stands:

Is he a tax-cutting, antiabortion, gun-rights conservative or is that campaign posturing?

Kilgore is no more a leader.

The referendum and transportation regional authorities are ideas born by man afraid of his own shadow.Hilary Goodman lives near Springfield’s Mixing Bowl interchange, which Virginia is rebuilding at a cost of $700 million. He drives to work at the U.S. Department of Justice in the District. And he is quick to point out that, despite the increases in real estate taxes he has endured recently, his top issue is traffic.

“Tell the gentlemen down in Richmond who are running for governor, don’t come and talk to us about capping assessments,” Goodman said. “Come and tell us what you are going to do about transportation.”

Kilgore has proposed the creation of local regional authorities that could hold voter referendums to raise taxes for roads. Kaine has said he supports the idea. But Goodman calls that just another “cop-out” by politicians looking for easy votes.

“It’s like saying, ‘We’re passing it to you to take care of the problem because we’re not doing it for you,’ ” Goodman said.

Kaine will be in Virginia Beach tomorrow, and Fredericksburg and Manassas on Wednesday. See if you can pin him down on some of these issues.

I’m not sure where Kilgore will be; his web site doesn’t list upcoming events unless they cost you to attend. Maybe he’s following President Bush’s idea of limiting who can come hear him to those guaranteed not to rock the boat.

If this keeps up, Russ Potts just might have a shot at winning — by default.

One of the best [blogs] is Commonwealth Commonsense, which is found at commonwealthcommonsense.typepad.com.

A Democrat from Northern Virginia, Bob Grindling, runs that blog, which last week contained some intelligent commentary about Kilgore’s accent.

“The flap over how Jerry Kilgore talks and what he says is penetrating the mainstream media after flying around the blogosphere for several weeks,” Grindling noted.

Other recent posts include his thoughts and those of others about whether America is a “Christian nation,” about the Kilgore campaign’s strategy of branding Kaine with the liberal label and the ever-present dish on Chapman.

Since Bob Gibson of the Charlottesville Daily Progress got the URL right, I’m willing to forgive the misspelling of my name. After all, I’ve been called worse.

Define racism. One could certainly make the argument that the cable networks that continually focus on these missing white women, to the virtual exclusion of minority women, are practicing a form of racism. The racism in this case, however, while predicated on color, does not concern itself with the color of one’s skin. Rather, it is based on the color of money, ratings points and competition. Would an African-American woman who went missing days before her wedding receive the same (or any) coverage as that of Wilbanks? Not likely.

More on missing white girls here.

The final of today’s moral trifecta is the case of the Kansas board of education. Basically, proponents of intelligent design say an almighty force (not necessarily God, they say) explains how we got here and not evolution. They want ID to be taught in the schools along with evolution. I guess you could do that by saying “some folks say we got here by Christian magic” and then move on to evolution. I mean, what else do you say after saying God did it?

Of course, I always thought God designed evolution. Evolution itself is a miracle to me, so I can’t see why evolution is a threat to Christianity. But The Washington Post gives ID a hard uppercut.

NEARLY FIVE YEARS into the 21st century, the Kansas State Board of Education has begun an earnest discussion of whether schools in that state should teach science that was obsolete by the end of the 19th century. The board is holding hearings into proposed changes to its model science standards, changes intended to cast doubt on conventional evolutionary biology and inject into classrooms the notion of “intelligent design” — the idea that the complexity of life can be explained only by some conscious creator’s having designed it.

Intelligent design is not your parents’ creationism. It’s a slick set of talking points that are not based on biblical inerrancy but framed, rather, in the language of science: molecular biology, the structure of DNA and holes in the fossil record. Moreover, the ostensible justification for the changes is a seductive one. Proponents say they mean merely to ensure that schoolchildren are given a full sense of the scientific controversy over evolution so that they can make up their own minds. Who can object to that?

But there is no serious scientific controversy over whether Darwinian evolution takes place. Intelligent design is not science. Whatever its rhetoric, the public questioning of evolution is fundamentally religious, not scientific, in nature.

Groups protesting the Kansas curriculum, sex education and the separation of church and state form the nexus of American Taliban movement. Say that, of course, and someone will accuse you of being against people of Christian faith. No, people of strong faith are those who understand that faith is a private matter, and they practice it by setting an example. There are many good people of faith who are legitimately upset by our moral waywardness. But most of them are toiling away in the vineyards. The American Taliban, on the other hand, is using those people and their beliefs to sell an agenda that is reminiscent of the McCarthy era. They want to squash dissent and impose their moral relativism. (Life is sacred but capital punishment is cool, for example.)

Again, we find the battleground to be the classroom. I welcome that, if for no other reason than it will engage kids to get involved in the issues of the day. If curriculum changes the Taliban wants in sex-ed or science class is accompanied by a freewheeling discussion in the classroom, then maybe it’s worth it. Progressives shouldn’t be afraid of “former gays” or ID proponents. But I suspect that a discussion of the issues is not what the Taliban want. We need to force it.

While regressives cast aside church members who don’t agree with their voting habits (see post below), just across the river from Virginia, the American Taliban attacked a sex education program and succeeded in killing it — at least for this year.

As The Washington Post noted in an editorial, there is at least one valid objection.

School officials need to remove some of the inappropriate “teacher resource” material accompanying the curriculum, particularly documents that praise some religious denom inations and criticize others; it’s no wonder some parents were upset about that. Though students don’t see this material, it shouldn’t have been deemed acceptable as the basis for teachers to plan lessons, and it shouldn’t have taken a court case for [School Superintendent] Mr. Weast to learn of it.

I absolutely agree that mentioning certain denominations is exactly what we don’t want schools to engage in. If we don’t want regressives to bring religion into the schools, then why would progressive educators do the same?

Still, this is an issue that I hope progressive Montgomery parents rally around, though I happen to favor at least allowing an appropriate opportunity for “reformed gays” to present their case. I’m willing to be corrected on this, but maybe because I would love to hear their arguments, I think high school students should, too.

I have three teenagers of my own and dozens more who pass through our doors on a regular basis. They’re not all liberals — in fact, they sometimes seem too apolitical — but on the issue of sex, they strike me a more knowledgeable and sophisticated than I was at their age. Where they stand on homosexuality, however, is another issue.

While I wouldn’t be surprised to find them more tolerant of gays than their parents, a recent school event gave me pause. It was the annual Mr. Woodson contest where about a dozen guys compete for the title by producing skits and answering a question, modeled after Miss America. A few of the skits this year made reference to gays that were not necessarily malicious but were gratuitous. One featured a straight guy being turned off by a homosexual proposition that had nothing to do with the theme of the skit. Another featured an effeminate music video director.

At the same time, my son, who did a stand-up comedy routine, was told he couldn’t use a joke that referred to sperm because it was “inappropriate.” He was to make light of a trainer’s instructions to keep a cold pack on his pulled groin by saying that it was proven that sperm couldn’t survive at that temperature. But making fun of gays was apparently appropriate.

Homosexuality wasn’t the only objections raised by a couple of groups in Montgomery County. They apparently didn’t want instruction on how to use a condom or a curriculum that acknowledged abstinence as only one way to avoid diseases and pregnancy.

Schools may be the arena where progressives can rally the troops. Parents who might be turned off by the American Taliban’s agenda can simply ignore it. But just like the regressives, they want to protect their kids from zealots who seek to indoctrinate the little tykes.

Vote Kerry? Get kicked out of church.

That’s the latest from the American Taliban movement. The pastor of a Waynesville, N.C. church led the effort to expel nine members for voting for John Kerry. Forty others in the 400-member church “resigned in protest.”

“This is very disturbing,” said Pastor Robert Prince III, who leads the congregation at the nearby First Baptist Church. “I’ve been a pastor for more than 25 years, and I have never seen church members voted out for something like this.”

…”It’s just an outrage for something like this to happen in America,” said Heidi Jenkins, 52, as she held a garage sale at her home down the street from the church.

Prince said he noticed during the presidential campaign that more pastors made endorsements _ although not from the pulpit _ than in past years.

“It used to be that pastors would speak about the issues and not specific candidates,” he said. “I think that line is being crossed.”

This doesn’t just happen in rural North Carolina towns. It’s happening, perhaps not so blatantly, in Loudoun County, Va., where, according to one parishioner, the pastor for Our Lady of Good Hope openly encourages the congregation to vote for Va. Del. Dick Black. You might think that he’s just promoting one of his own. Well, in the last election when Black ran against Patty Morrissey, the pastor actually preached against her — and she too is a member of the church.

Unfortunately, members of the church are reluctant to protest as did the members of the Waynesville, N.C. church, afraid, according to one member, of being ostracized by the pastor.

After reading about Pastor Chandler, one can appreciate their apprehension.

The remaining members [after those voted out left a meeting] decided that if another church wrote for the letters of those who left, East Waynesville would reply saying they had left in bad standing. Members also discussed changing the church bylaws to state that all members had to sign a statement saying they supported the pastor’s political views, [church member Bill] Rash said.

Sounds like a blacklist to me. No reports whether the church voted to stone to death women — but not men — who commit adultery.

The pastor is now trying to backtrack. A church meeting will be held tomorrow, perhoaps to discuss the issue.

What role Christianity should play in American governments is the provocative question of the day. It’s a question NPR is addressing in a series, the first part of which aired this morning with the second part this afternoon on “All Things Considered.”

The report cites the claims of many, I think with much justification, that this movement is prompted by a “longing for a culturally simpler time.” Many of us who are not religious or conservative worry about the tenor of public debate and the coarseness of our culture, but what concerns me more is what appears to be an American Taliban movement to make religion the basis for our government. How is longing for Christianity to be the guiding light of our public institutions any different from what the Taliban want?

The report goes on to discuss why some feel religion deserves a greater role, though opponents call the intellectual basis for this to be based on a “secret history” of the U.S. The Declaration and Constitution make no mention of Christianity, and on the report’s web page you’ll find quotes from historical figures supporting or debunking the claim that religion, let alone Christianity, is central to our form of government. What’s fascinating is that the quotes on both sides of the issues are often from the same people.

As some in the report suggests, the real reason many are pushing for a greater role of Christianity in government is religion is fear that Protestants are “slipping into the minority.”

The fastest growing religion in America may be Islam. That scares the hell out of Christians. It also explains why the radical right is attempting to emulate the Taliban while many of its leaders most loudly condemn the religion.

The Christian Bible is the oft-cited source of many regressive’s beliefs. You can see it here in the comments section of some posts. The Bible was used to justify slavery by its leading proponents such as Congressman James Jackson of Georgia in the 1790s.

So nothing is really new, except maybe the “secret history” that we are now being coerced to learn.