Ed Lynch continues to have a column.

Roanoke Times columnist Ed Lynch redefines “conception”:

[Virginia Senator John Edwards] co-patroned a bill last year, continued to 2005, to stipulate that contraception may not be considered abortion. In most cases, the two processes are indeed different, but the bill (SB456) to which Edwards puts his name includes as contraception a �process, devise or method [to prevent] the implantation of the fertilized ovum in the uterus.� Once there is a fertilized ovum, conception has already taken place. Edwards is either too medically uninformed to be co-patroning bills on pregnancy, or he is trying to get away with something.

Remember, Ed Lynch is a registered scientician™. But, in this case, he’s just making shit up. The medical definition of conception is:

Conception – the onset of pregnancy, usually marked by the implantation of an embryo into the uterine lining.

Lynch has joined the ranks of nutcases like Del. Dick Black and Del. Bob Marshall, who would like to see the use of contraceptives redefined as abortion. Looney-tones like these guys think that birth control pills and condoms and such should be illegal. Nevermind that they were skewered definitively decades ago:

And have been since before I was born,
And the one thing they say about Catholics is:
They’ll take you as soon as you’re warm.
You don’t have to be a six-footer.
You don’t have to have a great brain.
You don’t have to have any clothes on. You’re
A Catholic the moment Dad came,

Because

Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.

On the dusty ground.
God shall make them pay for
Each sperm that can’t be found.

Every sperm is wanted.
Every sperm is good.
Every sperm is needed
In your neighbourhood.

Hindu, Taoist, Mormon,
Spill theirs just anywhere,
But God loves those who treat their
Semen with more care.

Every sperm is useful.
Every sperm is fine.
God needs everybody’s.
Mine! And mine! And mine!

Let the Pagan spill theirs
O’er mountain, hill, and plain.
God shall strike them down for
Each sperm that’s spilt in vain.

Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is good.
Every sperm is needed
In your neighbourhood.

(From Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, of course.)

The rest of Lynch’s column is just as ridiculous. As he did in his October column about Sen. Creigh Deeds, Lynch compares a very limited subset of accomplishments by Democrats with the whole of the accomplishments by Republicans, and, unsurprisingly, finds that the Democrats come up wanting. He looks at the bills pre-filed for the upcoming General Assembly session by Democrats who are running for higher office and, finding nothing particularly exciting, points out that Republican Sen. Bob McDonnell (and candidate for attorney general) has filed many more bills of subjectively greater merit over the course of his entire career.

In Ed Lynch’s column, he uses just 376 unique words. That’s about as many words as a three-year old knows. Why is the Roanoke Times letting a man with the intelligence of a three-year-old write a column?