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Virginia's 'property rights' seem to have been minted in Boston Date published: 9/20/2005
Tyrannis Inc.
Property rights--alas--get 'real' THE STATE OF VIRGINIA hates dictators-- Sic Semper The other great anti-growth-control force in Virginia is the Old Dominion ethos, given interpretative teeth by the state Supreme Court, that supposedly makes ours a strong "property rights" state. Actually, however, given our state's and our region's heritage, rightly understood, much the opposite is true. Let's define terms. When someone invokes the phrase "property rights" in its current context, it's important to understand what he means. He does not mean, exactly, the "property" safeguarded in the Constitution's Fifth Amendment. Such property might include anything privately owned. But contemporary "property rights" seldom refer to automobiles or family heirlooms or the exercise equipment in your den. These days and in this place, the phrase normally concerns land. Land is, axiomatically, sacred to Southerners. The attachments of our people to the soil traditionally have been profound, whether rooted in a sprawling delta plantation or a subsistence dirt farm on a Tennessee hill. The land is what the cream of Southern manhood warred valiantly to protect--this is the hoary Southern perspective, at any rate--from invasion by the federal government. As Scarlett O'Hara's father, Gerald, explained, "Why, land is the only thing in the world worth workin' for, worth fightin' for, worth dyin' for, because it's the only thing that lasts." But it isn't lasting much in these parts and many other parts of the South, where development is a Second Reconstruction, upending settled life and creating The New and Different! Ironically, the governing institutions of our state--its lawmakers, its courts--aid and defend this onslaught of speculation and despoilment, this essentially Yankee world view, often because they fail to distinguish land, "the only thing that lasts," from
1. Be respectful. No personal attacks.
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