Sparta, Michigan is one of those places where if Forrest Gump were visiting for the day, the average IQ in the town would go up.

At least that's the impression I get from the actions of their Village Council, which (with one dissenting vote) is forcing a couple to spray herbicide all over the developing meadow in their back yard, and to replace it with grass. Mowed and watered grass.

Scott and Keri Greenup decided a while back that rather than wasting untold gallons of water and gas trying to keep their back yard looking Astroturf®, they'd develop it into a more natural native meadow with native grasses and wildflowers. (To keep the neighborhood looking suitably uniform, they kept the vegetation in the front yard all dark-green and stubby.) A couple of the retards in their neighborhood complained, apparently believing that Kentucky Blue Grass is what God intended to be grown here in Michigan. And it turns out there's an ordinance on the books in Sparta that aims to enforce that commandment.

The Greenups didn't give in without a fight. They took the matter to the appropriate government panel which actually recommended a change in the orinance, to let these people make that reasonable choice about how to manage their property. The Sparta Village Clavern voted 7-1 against that.

Village Idiot (or "Councilman" or whatever they call them) Bob Whalen said, "If you're going to allow one person to do it, you've got to allow anyone to do it." Duh. That'd be a stroke of brilliance... except that he apparently thinks that's an argument against repealing the brain-dead ordinance.

Fellow Idiot Todd Johnson said of their recovering meadowland, "It's not my idea of a manicured flowerbed." No shit, Sherlock. It's not supposed to be. It's supposed to be healthy and practical, not an artificial hobby showpiece.

When it comes to the whole "property rights" topic, I tend to be a skeptic. I don't abide by the radical anarcho-libertarian viewpoint that "owning" a piece of land means you can do whatever the hell you want to do with it (e.g. dumping toxic waste). The community ought to have a say as well. But only if they're smart enough, and willing to consider reasonable requests to do something "different".

In the U.S. Southwest, where the general scarcity of water has made the idiocy of golf-course-like yards obvious even to the local Villiage Idiots, natural yards are catching on. But not even the obscene current price of gas is enough to get the retards in Sparta to grasp that landscaping of this sort should be encouraged, not banned. I'm not about to go around demanding that people stop mowing their lawns, cease irrigating their faux fairways, and let their property return to the way God created it. But if someone wants to make that very sane and practical choice, the law shouldn't stand in their way. You don't need to be a genius to grasp that. Normal intelligence would be enough.