What’d I Say?

One of the neat things about writing for Patheos is that there’s no censorship here. I am free to write what I want and say what I think. That goes for the other writers. We go off in different directions all the time. There is no “official” Patheos position on what we say. Our thoughts are our own.

Take, for instance, a post that I recently wrote in which I referred to a small town here in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area called Valley Brook. I’m sure that the various Patheos writers would have taken many different positions on this issue.

Here’s part of what I said,

We have a whole town, called Valley Brook, here in Oklahoma that makes its revenue from prostitution under the guise of strip clubs. Nobody anywhere gets police protection like the strip clubs of Valley Brook. It appears on the outside that the Valley Brook Police work for the strip clubs.

I want to be clear about what I meant. I did not mean that the Valley Brook Police get direct money from the strip clubs that line the main street of Valley Brook. What I meant is that there are people who think that the police may be too zealous about protecting those strip clubs because it appears that the clubs are a major source of revenue for the town.

The Valley Brook police have a history of troubles, including a former police chief who pled guilty to drug charges last November.

While I want to state emphatically that I have no personal knowledge of prostitution occurring in the strip clubs at Valley Brook, and I certainly don’t want to make people think that I do, the town is the subject of jokes and discussion like this, this, this, this, this, and this about what many people say happens there.

There also have been arrests made by the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Department (not the Valley Brook Police, whose offices are a few blocks away from this club) for “lewd behavior” at the clubs in Valley Brook. For that story, go here. Based on these kinds of comments, conversations, and arrests it is my opinion that the stories about Valley Brook are probably true.