I don’t believe that removing Confederate monuments from public spaces through legal means puts us on a slippery slope at all. Let’s remember that many of these monuments were erected during the Jim Crow era as an homage to the cause of slavery and segregation – and as part of an ongoing, vicious campaign to intimidate those who thought differently.I agree with much of what my friend has written here. I've never been a fan of Lee, and I, too, have reflected on how many lives were shattered and lost because he used his talents on behalf of the Confederacy. If, after calm rational debate, the citizens of a town voted to remove statues of Lee and others on the basis of arguments like my friend articulates there'd be little reason to object.
The people memorialized by these monuments are not American heroes. Robert E. Lee was a brilliant general. He was also a traitor to this country who waged a war not only to preserve slavery but to expand it. Had he prevailed, the United States likely would not have become the greatest country in the world and the indignities of slavery would have been perpetuated.
Lee was an unapologetic advocate of slavery who thought the Emancipation Proclamation was an abomination. During his lifetime, plenty of people recognized that slavery was a terrible sin against God and humanity, so it’s not as if he was a victim of his times who didn’t know better. He chose to enable the oppression of an entire race and consequently sent tens of thousands of his fellow Southern soldiers, not to mention Union ones, to their deaths. That was his choice; we don’t need to give him monuments to affirm it.
I recently toured the Gettysburg battlefield with my family, a few weeks before the Charlottesville incident. It struck me, as we walked across the fields and through the museum, how many lives were needlessly lost because Lee chose to fight for the South and slavery. Had he applied his military genius in service of the Union and on behalf of human rights, the war probably would have been over before it even started. He has an extraordinary amount of blood on his hands, and it was all through his own choosing.
And this gets to the central difference between Lee/other Confederate leaders and our Founding Fathers. When Trump wonders where it all ends with the tearing down of monuments, this isn’t all that complicated either. Yes, Washington and Jefferson had slaves, and that is a serious stain on their legacies. Nevertheless, it wasn’t the defining aspect of their contributions to our country. They also brought the world’s greatest form of government into being. They are the Founding Fathers of our country, and their positive contributions to the world are enormous.
For Lee and his fellow Confederate leaders, it’s hard to say what they contributed beyond a lot of unnecessary suffering and death in their defense of an entirely indefensible institution. None of that deserves monuments. Their cause was not noble and neither was Lee.
But, in my opinion, the left is not demanding that the statues come down because Lee et al. were traitors to their country. Indeed, for some on the left that'd be to their credit. Rather, they want the statues gone because Lee is a symbol of the institution of slavery and that sin trumps whatever virtues he might have possessed.
Yet, once we countenance pulling down monuments of slave-owners who made no good contribution to the country, the next step will be to pull down monuments of slave-owners regardless of their other contributions. In fact, their other contributions will be eclipsed by the fact that they will be seen as racists, which fact will obviate, in the minds of many, everything else they've done. At that point there'll be no stopping the madness.
This isn't hypothetical. We're seeing it today. People on tv are calling for monuments to Washington and Jefferson to be purged. Even Lincoln's monuments are being vandalized, presumably because he pardoned the Confederates in order to promote national healing and also proposed that ex-slaves might wish to be sent to Liberia.
An article in the Washington Times summarizes some of the nuttiness:
Baltimore in the middle of the night removed its Confederate-tied monuments. North Carolina thugs in Durham tore down a Confederate soldier statue and kicked and spat on it. A pastor — a man of Christ — called for the renaming of Washington Park in Chicago, as well as the removal of its George Washington statue and the renaming of Jackson Park. Why? The names conjure images of slavery, he said.The bit about Al Sharpton objecting to spending federal tax dollars to support maintaining the Jefferson Memorial is especially funny. Sharpton's taxes are, or were, $4.5 million in arrears. Evidently not many of Reverend Al's tax dollars are going to the Jefferson Memorial in any case.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan removed the Taney statue from the State House — a step aimed at appeasing those offended by the fact it showed the likeness of the very U.S. Supreme Court justice, Roger B. Taney, who wrote the famous 1857 Dred Scott decision upholding slavery and denying citizenship to blacks.
Democrats in Congress called for an all-out cleansing of Confederate-tied statues, monuments and structures from Statuary Hall, a Capitol Hill fixture and popular tourist draw that contains dozens of contributions from individual states.
“The Capitol is a place for all Americans to come and feel welcomed, encouraged and inspired,” said Sen. Cory Booker, New Jersey Democrat. “Confederate statues do the opposite.”
This, from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi: “The Confederate statues in the halls of Congress have always been reprehensible. If Republicans are serious about rejecting white supremacy, I call upon Speaker [Paul] Ryan to join Democrats to remove the Confederate statues from the Capitol immediately.”
... The left’s only warming up. This insanity is not going to end any time soon. The train still has to ride over the Washington, D.C., monuments of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Al Sharpton’s already called on Congress to defund the Jefferson Memorial in the District, saying Jefferson “had slaves and children with the slaves” and that tax dollars that are used to fund this monument are an affront.
“When you look at the fact that public monuments are supported by public funds,” Sharpton told Charlie Rose in a recent televised interview, “you are asking me to subsidize the insult of my family.”
Keep going. The journey’s not over. Next stop: The documents of these so-dubbed racist Founding Fathers. The Declaration of Independence. The U.S. Constitution. And the question that looms — the question that’s to be posed by the left: How can these documents represent the freedoms of all, when they were penned by those with racist mindsets?
Once it’s admitted into U.S. society that Jefferson and Washington have no business being represented in the public memorials of America, it’s only a small, very small step to say the same of their writings? But what are we going to do, rip up the original Declaration of Independence — tear the Constitution to shreds? What would that accomplish?
Perhaps, though, the award for the most risible piece of insanity connected to this whole business has to go to ESPN which has decided that they can't have an Asian-American named Robert Lee announce a football game played by the University of Virginia because his name is the same as that of the odious general.
I once had a student named Jeff Davis. I wonder if he's decided to change his name yet.
If men who transgressed liberal ideas of righteousness in some areas of their lives, even though they may have done much good otherwise, deserve to be expunged from our national memory, who will be left? As another friend told me recently, if we're going to remove the statues of everyone who was in some way morally flawed there'll only be one statue left, the one that overlooks Sao Paulo, Brazil. That won't make a lot of folks on the left happy either.
