Tag Archives: race

Valdosta Mayor provides more earned media for group he doesn’t like

Valdosta Mayor Gayle continues to provide earned media to a group he doesn’t agree with, South Georgia Pride. He says people support him ten to 1 in refusing to issue a proclamation against bullying. Yet a local TV online poll is running 2 to 1 against his position. In addition to the obvious cultural issues, there are also economic issues involved.

Dean Poling wrote for the VDT today, Pride denied: Valdosta mayor denies LGBT event proclamation,

Gayle said responses are running 10-1 in agreement with his decision.

WTXL.tv (ABC 27) asks in a poll attached to a story by Jade Bulecza yesterday, Mayor turns down proclamation request from gay community,

Do you agree with Mayor Gayle’s decision not to sign the P.R.I.D.E. Proclamation?
Yes (32.4%)
No (67.6%)

That looks to me like 2 to 1 against the mayor’s position. Bulecza’s story included:

“Most of them (proclamations) are for the cancer society, the heart fund, you know things like this or either a pastor at a church for so many years and everything and this is the first one I get like this where my beliefs interfere with it,” said Mayor Gayle.

The mayor says he recognizes all the group does for the community. He says he welcomes everyone to Valdosta.

Since Mayor Gayle took office in January this is the only proclamation he turned down. The south Georgia group says they had a proclamation signed last year.

In less than a year in office the mayor has already found difficulty separating his personal beliefs from his office as mayor.

What was he asked to sign, anyway? The VDT story has the details:

The requested proclamation does not include an endorsement of gay marriage nor does it officially endorse the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender lifestyle.

“The proclamation opposes bullying and hate crimes based on sexual orientation,” Williams said. “It says the city recognizes we’re here and we’re part of the community.”

In essence, the submitted proclamation would have noted that the South Georgia Pride Committee:

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Bright flight visualized

Lanier County gained more than 30% in children under 18. Lanier looks like the exurbs around Atlanta, except it’s even more striking. Also visible on the map is Hamilton, County, Tennessee, home of Chattanooga, CUEE’s favorite example of school unification: Hamilton County showed a loss of children while just across the state line Catoosa County, Georgia gained 15-30%. If school unification doesn’t cause bright flight, it doesn’t seem to stop it.

Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg wrote in USA Today 3 June 2011, Census reveals plummeting U.S. birthrates

Because families with children tend to live near each other,

the result is an increasingly patchy landscape of communities teeming with kids, and others with very few.

…

Even in counties where the percentage of children grew, only 49 gained more than 1 percentage point — many of them suburbs on the outer edge of metropolitan areas such as Forsyth, Whitfield and Newton outside Atlanta and Cabarrus and Union outside Charlotte.

So that makes Lanier County one of only 49 Continue reading →

Wake-up and break off the spell of the Leviathan —George Boston Rhynes

This comment from George Boston Rhynes arrived just now, on “Talk to my chairman”. -jsq
I was at the last LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS MEETING when Chairman Ashley Paulk shared information about the Biomass Project extension being denied and the alleged secrecy surrounding keeping the general public ignorant.
“Because certain people won’t share with you and I think it’s unfair. We were approached about three weeks ago, Mr. (Joe) Pritchard (County Manager) was, by the Industrial Authority, and we were tentatively asked to make a move to ask that they not extend the contract.” (Chairman Paulk!)
Chairman Paulk words prove that there is an apparent pattern and practice
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The mentality that exploits and destroys the natural environment –Wendell Berry

And now a word from Wendell Berry:
The mentality that exploits and destroys the natural environment is the same that abuses racial and economic minorities…. The mentality that destroys a watershed and then panics at the threat of flood is the same mentality that gives institutionalized insult to black people and then panics at the prospect of race riots.
Source: “Think Little” in A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural, by Wendell Berry, 1972. Forty years later, that mentality is still a problem.

-jsq