Sixteen words. Just sixteen words amended to the U.S. Constitution set out the conditions for religious freedom in America. These are the beginning words of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”1 You are free to choose a religion or not, as you wish, without government interference. Since ...
Virginia is one of the wealthiest states in America, according to U.S. News & World Report1. With median annual income of $66,262, the state enjoys a prime perch among the Top 10, at #8. Median income is far more important a measure than average income, since it represents the exact middle of earners; half earn less, half earn more. Many ...
“Man was sort of evoluted. From the Old World Monkeys.” So says Howard Blair, child on the witness stand, in the play Inherit the Wind. The play gave way to a fine movie, but it is still produced as a play and audiences still get to see a little child on a witness stand. The sight is unsettling; children are ...
The American Institute of Stress1 courteously points out that divorce is the second-most stressful thing you can do (second only to having your spouse die). We even have a standardized measurement tool for stress: The Holmes-Rahe Stress Inventory, which gives a 73 out of 100 to divorce. For less than that amount of stress from only the one event, you ...
Unmarried fathers, says the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)1, accounted for 36 percent of first births for fathers in the 2000s. Various Virginia institutions, traditionalists and social circles can frown and fret all they want, but practical agencies that deal with the day-to-day realities of life in 21st century Virginia accept unmarried fathers as inhabiting roughly one-third of the landscape. ...
We live in an era of false equivalence. One person’s uninformed opinion is supposed to be as respected and valid as another person’s researched and studied opinion. In a just argument, you will represent all sides of an issue fairly, accept your burden of proof, and reason correctly. This means looking at both sides of a situation, such as invalidating ...
Scarlett Johansson, aka Black Widow, may be one of the highest-paid actresses and a striking beauty, but she is also a Mom. In filing for divorce from husband Romain Dauriac on March 7, 2017, Johansson now contends1 with a custody battle over her daughter, Rose. This is the first lesson of custody fights: you may be somebody’s superhero, but in ...
What did Virginians do more of in 2016, get married or get divorced? Because divorce is usually amplified and advertised as some sort of scourge of the Commonwealth, most folks would say Virginians got divorced more. They’d be wrong. In fact, Virginians married at a rate more than twice the state divorce rate, 7 percent versus 3.4 percent, according to ...
Something you own is valuable when a person is standing in front of you, peeling off the Benjamins. That is the most accurate appraisal you will ever get. Even appraisers get fooled, as with Antiques Roadshow's $50,000 appraisal1 of a 19th century "grotesque face mug" that turned out to be a kid's high school art project from the 1970s. Accurate ...