I had the great honor to be selected by the senior class at Trinity Episcopal School to deliver their commencement address in 2004.  I was also selected in 1996.  Below are links to the texts of both speeches.

• 1996
• 2004 

I, along with many others wrote a letter to the editor in response to an article in the October 19, 2003 edition of the Richmond Times Dispatch.  The text of my letter is below as are links to the Original Article and Malone's response.

• Original Article
• Malone's response

As a teacher and a lifelong resident of the city of Richmond I am outraged by the remarks of School Board member Reginald M. Malone Sr.  How can we, the citizens of this great city, ever expect to get the kind of school system of which we can all be proud when we have school board members who show so little support for their teachers?  Mr. Malone suggests that Ms. Hamlin was at fault for being thrown to the ground and beaten by a young man at least thirty five years her junior.  According to the incident report, the student was using the classroom telephone, and Ms. Hamlin asked him to end the conversation three times before taking it from him.  It seems to me she gave him ample opportunity to tell her if there was some sort of emergency.  However, according to Mr. Malone, “You’ve got to be careful who you take the phone from.  He could say, ‘I was on the phone with my mama and she had an accident.’”  Even if events did not occur exactly as described in the report, the fact remains that Ms Hamlin was thrown to the ground and beaten to the extent that she had to be taken to the hospital.  Nothing she could have done, or not done, warranted that, Mr. Malone.  Get well soon, Ms. Hamlin.

I wrote this letter after the following line appeared in the Week's End Section of the Editorial page of the Richmond Times Dispatch on September 15, 2001. 

"Another prospectively positive accomplishment of the 18 hijacker/ terrorists: rendering nearly certain Bush's re-election."

They didn't publish it.

On September 15, four days after the darkest single day in American history, you opined, "Another prospectively positive accomplishment of the 18 hijacker/terrorists: rendering nearly certain Bush’s reelection." In doing so, you not only displayed an ignorance of history but also incredible insensitivity to the families of victims who might have been Democrats.

Three years can be an eternity in politics, and President Bush’s reelection depends, as it always has, on how he handles himself over the next three years. His father enjoyed tremendous support during the Gulf War and lost to Bill Clinton two years later.

The Times Dispatch finds itself in the undoubtedly familiar company of Jerry Falwell, who has also used this tragedy to try to further his own political agenda. This is not a time for division and politics as usual in the United States.

President Bush has, and deserves, our strong support as a nation during this crisis. Comments like the one in Saturday’s Week’s End section only serve to undermine this support.

As of August 7, 2004, I would say that I was more prophetic than the esteemed editors of the Richmond Times Dispatch.  Bush's reelection is certainly possible, but it is far from certain.

This was in response to an editorial called "Quick Fixes" which appeared in the Richmond Times Dispatch on February 18, 2003.  The paper did not publish my letter or any other regarding this, but they did print a correction two days later on February 20.

In your editorial Quick Fixes, you state that, "President Bush should use the line-item power everyone seems to have forgotten he has and excise such absurdities as..."  The reason everyone seems to have forgotten he has this power is that he doesn't! 

The line-item veto was signed into law by President Clinton in 1996 and took effect in January of 1997.  Clinton became the first, and only, president to use this power in 1997 because the line-item veto was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1998.  The Court ruled in Clinton v. City of New York that the law violated the Presentment Clause of Article I and that a constitutional amendment was needed in order to give the president this power.

This example of incredibly poor research, of course, is just the latest in a long line of factual errors and distortions of the truth that appear almost daily on the Editorial Page of the Tee Dee.  In the case of Quick Fixes, the overall point that one way to “fix” the problem of increasing deficits is to check the proliferation of pork-barrel projects is valid.  Your suggestion that the president exercise a nonexistent power as part of a solution calls into question your ability even to discuss seriously issues of such weight.  Richmond  deserves better!

My first letter to the editor of the Richmond Times Dispatch was published on October 10, 1998.  It was a response to a piece by Bevin Alexander entitled "Cool Heads Could Have Averted War" that appeared on the front page of the Commentary section on October 10, 1998.  My letter brought a rather negative response that was published on October 16.  Finally, I wrote a response to the response that was published about a week later.  More recently, I wrote a response to a letter dealing with the same subject that appeared in the Richmond Times Dispatch on July 3, 2004 .  I never sent the letter but you can read it and everything else mentioned here by clicking on the links below.

• "Cool Heads Could Have Averted War"
• My First Letter
• October 16
• My Second Letter
• Helping Vermont Secede
• July 3, 2004 
• My Third Letter

On June 26, 2002  the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California ruled 2-1 in Michael A. Newdow v. US Congress, et al. (2002) that a 1954 act of Congress inserting the phrase "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional. This means, the court held, that the Pledge may no longer be sponsored by public schools. This ruling sparked much comment in the media.  Issues that have arisen other than whether the court ruling was correct include the meaning of the First Amendment and whether the United States is a Christian nation.  Ross Mackenzie, a columnist for the Richmond Times Dispatch, asserted that we are indeed a Christian nation in a column entitled Under God: A Piece of Cake Easier than even 'Re Went to the Store on July 4.  Many of the letters cited below were in response to this column.

I wrote two letters to the Richmond Times Dispatch in three weeks concerning this issue.  The first was in response to a letter published on July 8 entitled First Amendment Limits Congress, Not Us.  The second responded to three letters published under the banner Christian Nation Provokes Debate on July 29.  My first letter was published on July 21 along with several others.  The second letter was not published since it was submitted so soon after the first one. There was a letter in the July 30 edition of the Richmond Times Dispatch entitled Founders Created Christian Nation in which there were references to David Barton and Church of the Holy Trinity v. U.S. (1892).  Three more letters on the subject were published on July 31 under the headline T-D Readers Weigh In on the Pledge.  Relevant letters were also published on July 12, July 14, July 15, July 17, July 18, and July 28.

About a year later, on September 2, 2003, the Richmond Times Dispatch published an editorial entitled Endowed? in which the author asked the question, "Can government acknowledge God?"  I wrote a letter responding that government should neither acknowledge nor deny the existence of God.  It was a rather long letter, and they chose not to publish it, but I think it is a well reasoned response to all of the arguments made in the editorial.  Read them both and let me know what you think.  The text of the editorial and my letter may be accessed by clicking on Endowed? and letter.

The Pledge case was argued before the Supreme Court in the Spring of 2004.  I used this case in my Government class for a simulation of the Supreme Court.  Click on Mock Supreme Court for details about the assignment and Pledge of Allegiance Resources for all the background, latest news, and legal documents regarding this case.  "On June 14, 2004, the Supreme Court issued a decision in the Pledge of Allegiance case, Elk Grove v. Newdow, No. 02-1624.  The Court ruled that Michael Newdow, the California atheist who brought suit on behalf of his daughter, lacked standing to sue because the child's mother, Sandra Banning, has "what amounts to a tie-breaking vote" on issues related to the child's education."

This leaves the Constitutional question unresolved.  Undoubtedly it will come up again.