Good news, bad news 

Then there was Pat Stith and David Raynor's story this week showing that the owners of one in three vehicles in the Triangle are probably paying too high a property tax on them because local tax offices don't adjust values for high mileage, and often don't tell people it's grounds for appealing their valuation.

But my favorite story recently was Keung Hui (pron. Kern, by the way) throwing a light on the curriculum at Cary Christian School. It focused on a booklet called "Southern Slavery, As It Was" that's used in ninth grade classes on the Civil War. The booklet, as Hui summarizes it, "attempts to provide biblical justification for slavery and asserts that slaves weren't treated as badly as people think."

You can see one quote on the Front Porch, page 7. Or, Hui reported, there's this: "Slavery as it existed in the South was not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity. Because of its dominantly patriarchal character, it was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence." It goes on and on.

One of the authors of the booklet, Douglas Wilson, is behind the "classical Christian" philosophy on which the school is based. He is scheduled to be the graduation speaker in May. The booklet's other author, Steve Wilkins, is on the board of the League of the South, a neo-Confederate group that is classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report.

School principal Larry Stephenson told Hui the booklet was used to foster debates in class.

We started imagining some of the other sides of some of the other historical topics that might be under discussion at Cary Christian School: