A little backround – Lincoln County is adjacent to Kanawha County (Charleston) and is birthplace of one of our favorite sons – Chuck Yeager. It coal mining country, with a population 99% white, and the largest minority being Hispanic (there are 8 African-Americans living in Lincoln Cty; not 8%, just 8). The median household income is $23,000, and median home value $60,000.

When Obama sneered about folks clinging to their religion and their guns, it was these folks he had in mind. They vote Democratic because of their deeply held pro-labor stance, but they are as socially conservative as it gets.

I suspect there’s a ‘crazy like a fox’ thing going on here though. Eldridge has good credentials (BA & MA from Marshall), and a lifetime of working with kids as a teacher, counselor and social worker. He’s been in the trenches, and I expect has some sense of what it means to grow up in the sticks and in poverty. And because of that, he may mean exactly what he’s said.

Or maybe he just wanted his 15 minutes of fame. Now the press can go back to the incessant coverage of Octomom.

PL

Jason R.: Again…these types of things are exclusive to West Virginia.There is plenty of stupid things going on in Ohio.

Oops. I meant NOT exclusive

It actually makes me wonder what’s up with Eldridge. Should we be concerned that we’re electing people to office who think this way?

W.V. offers its students something called the Promise Scholarship in which a student with a 3.0 average and I can’t remember the ACT score (maybe 21) is given a scholarship to pay for an in-state school for the entire four years. I wish other states, like Ohio, would be that progressive. Don’t you?

The barbie thing is silly but we have probably both seen the effects that body image has on teenage girls. It isn’t just barbie, but I have had to deal with issues of anorexia by some high school students and it is so sad to think that they have such a distorted self-image.

I completely understand people’s aversion to how the doll can be made out to be this über symbol of female physical perfection. But you know what, I think, after 50 years, we really do understand more than ever that that is a TOY, it is NOT what we really strive for, that physical appearance has no causal connection to intelligence and that it is, as you point out, primarily a parenting issue.

The fact is, if you get rid of the Barbies and other dolls that influence girls to be beautiful, as he writes in the bill, what about the magazines? What about the satelitte and cable shows and infomercials? What about the ads at busstops and on buses, on billboards?

I agree – as a parent with a daughter and a woman who as a girl went through five Barbies (and a Midge) that her brothers tortured in the most typical and predictable ways, I do not want state legislators putting time into this.

I can’t believe that W. Virginia’s economy is much better than Ohio – there has got to be a better use of this skills.

I will say that, after growing up in a very conservative household with all-boy siblings, I have two preschool girls of my own. I do cringe a little with how much emphasis is placed on beauty. But, based on their low media input, it comes from their hearts.

I think trying to remove the desire for radiance and beauty from little girls is about as silly as trying to get 10 year old boys to slow down! Not good parenting OR governance.