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Don't accept the scare stories about gay marriage

Re: "Gay marriage threatens our culture," June 29 commentary:

I am a straight woman married to a straight man. I am the mother of two, the grandmother of two, a faithful churchgoer and a patriotic American. And I have many gay friends, many of whom are in permanent, loving relationships.

I am so glad that the world has changed since the 1950s, the era when I came of age, which Jim Ludington seems to want to bring back. How would insisting that gay people remain closeted and miserable, as they were then, help my marriage and my family? The higher the sum total of human happiness, and the greater the number of loving, committed relationships, the better the world will be.

Why would a loving God have created people whom God, and we, are then supposed to hate? God made gay people. God loves gay people. That's really all I need to know.

I hope your readers will reject scare tactics and slippery-slope arguments that try to convince us that if gay, consenting adults are allowed to marry, then legalized polygamy, legalized pedophilia and the collapse of civilization are surely next.

No cause celebre out of Midwest floods

Where are all of the Hollywood celebrities, holding their telethons asking for help in restoring flood-ravaged Iowa? Where are all the media asking the tough questions about why the federal government hasn't solved the problem, such as with FEMA trucks/trailers?

Why isn't the federal government relocating Iowans to free hotels and giving them free credit cards? Where are all the looters, stealing high-end tennis shoes, appliances, furniture and big screen TVs?

Where are the people declaring that President Bush hates white, rural people? The property, personal and economic loss from flooding, coupled with the magnitude of the damaged area, far exceeds the loss in New Orleans, yet no one is screaming about the injustice.

Where are all the screaming liberals now? Since they can't create a national crisis on injustice, they aren't interested. We should use all the liberals as sandbags, but they probably wouldn't hold water either.

Nixing Walgreens seems inconsistent

Re: "Botetourt Co. rejects building new Walgreens," June 25 Virginia news story:

The Botetourt County Board of Supervisors is inconsistent when it comes to approving requests to build new businesses. Its recent denial to rezone a portion of land for a Walgreens store seems that way to me.

When Supervisor Billy Martin rationalized, "Why do we need four drugstores in the Daleville area?" he must have forgotten the approval last year for Kroger to put in gasoline tanks at its Daleville store. He should have had the same concern as he did to deny Walgreens. Why? Because there are a half-dozen locations that sell gasoline within a mile radius of Kroger.

Vote as if the planet were at stake; it is

I think that everyone should listen to Bob Dylan's song "Everything is broken" and vote for a change. What do we have to lose? Oh yeah -- the planet.

Help Peru heal; adopt a sister city

You seldom hear about Peru in the news anymore. From 1980 to 2000, Peru suffered from a civil war. The nation's military and the revolutionary movement, Shining Path, committed atrocities involving thousands of casualties.

Recently, a mass grave of an entire village was found in the Andes. The military considered the village to be sympathetic to Shining Path. Shining Path led a campaign of terror for 20 years. Since 2003, when a national committee for truth and reconciliation issued its final report, there has been a slow process of healing for that country.

I ask that the Sister City Committee here in Roanoke please consider a Peruvian city as a sister city, perhaps the city of Huancayo or the city of Ica.

Iraq war report points to leadership gap

Re: "Iraq mission lacked staff, report says," June 30 front page story:

After five years and 4,100 deaths, it is about time your paper begins giving informed, headline coverage to the Iraq war. This report provides what knowledgeable observers have been saying for five years, and until now they have had their patriotism questioned because of this criticism.

What angers me most is that several presidential candidates had stated they have the experience to be president on Day One, yet never became critical of President Bush's handling of the war until Rep. Dennis Kucinich began raising questions. This does not represent Day One leadership, but follow-the-wind leadership.

Sens. John McCain and Hillary Clinton were late to recognize this, instead calling Iraq as late as last year the central front in the war on terror while Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan conducting the largest and longest diversion effort in military history.

Our country needs smart, Day One leadership that will draw upon military advisers to plot an effective new course in the war on terror, rather than a traditional Washington leadership approach where lobbyists play a central role in how our military resources are being expended.

McCain's character nothing to brag about

I have been receiving e-mails trumpeting Sen. John McCain's character. It seems he visits VA hospitals without an entourage of reporters, his son is serving in Iraq, he himself served honorably as a Naval officer.

In these e-mails, the sender omits that McCain has staunchly supported the Iraq nightmare, has shown no remorse for the million innocent men, women and children murdered by this administration, and apparently has given no thought to ending this madness that's ending America.

Nor is mention made of his having unloaded a wife disfigured in an automobile accident to marry an attractive, wealthy woman.

Election 2008 is no joking matter. (We've had all the jokes we can afford the past eight years.) Either we raise the bar this election, or we can kiss the old USA goodbye. For starters, we might shoot for a president with brains, vision and concern for the middle class.

And we can kneel and ask God's forgiveness for the awful wrong we have visited upon an innocent people. Until we can do this, our own character, as is McCain's, is seriously wanting.

Forget $3 gas and look for alternatives

Contrary to what the politicians say, we probably will never see $3 gas again. If we start drilling every known (or suspected) oil pool in America and offshore, build plants to extract oil from coal and oil shale, and go full tilt on ethanol from sugar and switchgrass, none of this fuel will reach gas pumps until about 2018.

By then oil will be $450 a barrel ($13 a gallon for gasoline). These new sources of fuel will slow the rising price of oil, but not by much. By 2018, we would still be importing 40 to 50 percent of our fuel.

We need ultralight cars now, made from reinforced thermoplastic, weighing 1,000 to 1,200 pounds, with 0.7 to 0.8 L gas engines, which get 80 to 100 mpg. Hybrids would get 120 to 150 mpg.

We also need a federal program for battery research to allow all cars, trucks, buses and trains to be all electric by 2030. We need 500,000 wind turbines to charge these and to allow all fossil fuel power plants to be shut down by then. Electricity from solar panels should also be competitive by then.

We desperately need a Plan B. Write your congressman.