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 The Chronicle welcomes you online! Please feel free to respond to these editorials or letters to the editor by sending your letters to the editor.

We condense letters; most, as published, won't exceed 300 words. A letter must include the writer's name and city, which will be published, and an address and telephone number for verification, which will not be published. Writers may be limited to one letter every 30 days. Open letters, letters to third parties and poetry are not considered. Letters from people living outside the Chronicle's circulation area usually are not considered.

Blasts 'old fashioned' family values

Web posted October 6, 1999

Editor, The Chronicle

Practically every week there is a letter to the editor concerning religion in the public schools, old fashioned morals and bringing back family values. How far back do we want to go to get our values? Do we want to go back to the '60 and '70s when all the young people were considered hippies smoking pot and a little pill created the sexual revolution? Maybe we should go back further, back to when we could pray for the soul of a black person but would not allow one to sit next to us on a bus or eat in the same restaurant with whites. Perhaps we should go back even further, back to when women were not allowed to vote or own property. ...

Let's go back to when this country was first settled, when men held their Bibles and prayed while burning women at the stake for being "witches.'' Maybe we should go back to England before this country was founded where the government determined which religion was allowed. ...

If that's not far enough, let's go back to biblical family values. Let's look at Abraham's family. His wife Sarah talked him into sleeping with her maid so that the maid could bear him a son. ...

Let's move on to Jacob's family values. He married sisters who provided him with a bunch of offspring. And what did their sons do? They sold their young brother into slavery. Then there was King David who fell in love with Bathsheba, and sent her husband to the front lines to be killed. ...

Let's move on to the very first family. Adam and Eve had two sons and one killed the other. That's as far back as we can go unless we step outside the Bible.

No scientists have presented us with enough evidence to convince us that we descended from Norman Rockwell-type families. As time passes Homo sapiens become more civilized. It's an evolutionary process.

If you want your kids to grow up to be honest, compassionate, caring human beings, you begin teaching them at a very early age, and you teach them by example.

Hoyt Goodson, Waynesboro