Let’s Remove Everything That’s Offensive
August 26, 2017 at 5:18 a.m.
By Gary [email protected]
There’s a whole lot of denouncing going on right now. Lots of statues of confederate soldiers are being removed – some by municipalities and some by vandals.
It’s easy to denounce these historic figures. They fought to maintain slavery and lost. They were on the wrong side of the argument.
I can see why people would be offended by those statues. Lots of these statues – eventually all of them, if I had to guess – will likely be removed from the public sphere.
President Trump got in a lot of trouble from the media, every living Democrat and lots of Republicans over this issue last week – and again in his Phoenix rally Tuesday – when he talked about the deadly racist mayhem in Virginia.
Trump’s problem is the lack of a filter. See, even if what you are saying is demonstrably true, sometimes it’s better just to keep your mouth shut.
It’s like if your wife asks, “Honey, do these pants make me look fat?” Are you going to say, “No dear, it’s your big, fat rear end that makes you look fat.” Of course not. You use discretion.
So Trump’s comment that there were bad people on both sides, while true, was better left unsaid. Just denounce the supremacists and move on.
But another thing Trump said was moderately prescient. He called the tearing down of statues and erasing of history foolish. Invoking a slippery slope argument he asked who was next, Washington, Jefferson?
Lots of people thought that was silly and Trump was roundly belittled for the suggestion. Yes, those guys were slave owners, but they didn’t secede from the Union. They didn’t fight to maintain slavery. Those were different times and slavery was the norm. The Civil War was 100 years later. There’s no argument for tearing down those statues.
Well, it didn’t take long before some very prominent and vocal folks on the left were calling for just that.
The Rev. Al Sharpton told Charlie Rose on PBS that we need to stop public funding of any reminder of the nation’s racist past. Things like the Jefferson Memorial, for example.
"When you look at the fact that public monuments are supported by public funds, you are asking me to subsidize the insult of my family, and I would repeat that the public should not be paying to uphold somebody who had that kind of background. ... We're talking about, here, an open display of bigotry announced, and over and over again."
Political commentator and former Congressional Black Caucus director Angela Rye demanded that all memorials and likenesses of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee be taken down.
“George Washington was a slave owner, and we need to call slave owners out for what they are, whether we think they were protecting American freedom or not,” Rye said on CNN. “He wasn’t protecting my freedom. My ancestors weren’t deemed human beings to him. So to me, I don’t care if it’s a George Washington statue or a Thomas Jefferson statue or a Robert E. Lee statue. They all need to come down.”
"Hamilton" star Leslie Odom Jr. told TMZ he thought removing George Washington and Thomas Jefferson statues is worthy of discussion.
There are tons of other examples of this thinking.
In most cases it’s liberals who are claiming the moral high ground and asking for stuff to be torn down, all the while labeling conservatives as racists.
You know, at first, I was a little squeamish about this. It sounded too much like something that would happen in some war-torn Middle Eastern country. An army led by this faction or that faction takes over a territory and then starts destroying things to erase the history of those they conquer.
But the more I think about it, I’m starting to reach a certain level of moral comfort regarding the destruction of historical icons – as long as we’re going to be fair about it, that is.
Let’s start with Robert Byrd, the long-serving Democrat Senator from West Virginia.
More than 50 buildings built with funds from U.S. taxpayers directed to West Virginia are named for either Byrd or his wife. There are schools and highways, too. Problem is, Byrd was the Exalted Cyclops of the local Klan unit he founded and recruited.
Oh, sure, he renounced the Klan in the late 1900s, but does that make his earlier antics any less offensive?
It’s going to take awhile to scrape Byrd’s name off all that stuff.
Then there’s J. William Fulbright, a Democrat from Arkansas. He was a devoted segregationist who signed the Southern Manifesto in 1956. That document, written in the U.S. Congress, opposed racial integration of public places. It was in response to the 1954 Brown V. Education ruling that determined school segregation was unconstitutional.
There are lots of things named after that Fulbright fellow, too. Not the least of which is the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, which offers research, study and teaching opportunities in over 140 countries to recent graduates and graduate students.
Gotta end all that nonsense.
I could go on and on ... and on. But you get the picture. Rocks and glass houses come to mind.
Never mind that it was the Democrats who were on the wrong side of the civil rights argument from the Dred Scott case in 1857 to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
But I have to give them credit. They’ve been particularly adept at turning the tables on Republicans and labeling them racists.
Sure, LBJ was president and signed the Civil Rights Act into law after Republicans pushed it through Congress, but one must wonder about his motives given quotes like this from his biography by Doris Kearn Goodwin.
These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.
After being the party of the KKK for decades, Democrats figured out that if blacks were going to vote, they might as well vote Democrat.
Next comes the “war on poverty” – a plethora of government programs that increased benefits provided by the government by 2000 percent from 1965 to 1974.
Did this create an entire class of people dependent on the government? Does reliance on government programs influence voting?
Yeah, I’m all for removing images of morally reprehensible people from the public sphere.
But all of them.
There’s a whole lot of denouncing going on right now. Lots of statues of confederate soldiers are being removed – some by municipalities and some by vandals.
It’s easy to denounce these historic figures. They fought to maintain slavery and lost. They were on the wrong side of the argument.
I can see why people would be offended by those statues. Lots of these statues – eventually all of them, if I had to guess – will likely be removed from the public sphere.
President Trump got in a lot of trouble from the media, every living Democrat and lots of Republicans over this issue last week – and again in his Phoenix rally Tuesday – when he talked about the deadly racist mayhem in Virginia.
Trump’s problem is the lack of a filter. See, even if what you are saying is demonstrably true, sometimes it’s better just to keep your mouth shut.
It’s like if your wife asks, “Honey, do these pants make me look fat?” Are you going to say, “No dear, it’s your big, fat rear end that makes you look fat.” Of course not. You use discretion.
So Trump’s comment that there were bad people on both sides, while true, was better left unsaid. Just denounce the supremacists and move on.
But another thing Trump said was moderately prescient. He called the tearing down of statues and erasing of history foolish. Invoking a slippery slope argument he asked who was next, Washington, Jefferson?
Lots of people thought that was silly and Trump was roundly belittled for the suggestion. Yes, those guys were slave owners, but they didn’t secede from the Union. They didn’t fight to maintain slavery. Those were different times and slavery was the norm. The Civil War was 100 years later. There’s no argument for tearing down those statues.
Well, it didn’t take long before some very prominent and vocal folks on the left were calling for just that.
The Rev. Al Sharpton told Charlie Rose on PBS that we need to stop public funding of any reminder of the nation’s racist past. Things like the Jefferson Memorial, for example.
"When you look at the fact that public monuments are supported by public funds, you are asking me to subsidize the insult of my family, and I would repeat that the public should not be paying to uphold somebody who had that kind of background. ... We're talking about, here, an open display of bigotry announced, and over and over again."
Political commentator and former Congressional Black Caucus director Angela Rye demanded that all memorials and likenesses of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee be taken down.
“George Washington was a slave owner, and we need to call slave owners out for what they are, whether we think they were protecting American freedom or not,” Rye said on CNN. “He wasn’t protecting my freedom. My ancestors weren’t deemed human beings to him. So to me, I don’t care if it’s a George Washington statue or a Thomas Jefferson statue or a Robert E. Lee statue. They all need to come down.”
"Hamilton" star Leslie Odom Jr. told TMZ he thought removing George Washington and Thomas Jefferson statues is worthy of discussion.
There are tons of other examples of this thinking.
In most cases it’s liberals who are claiming the moral high ground and asking for stuff to be torn down, all the while labeling conservatives as racists.
You know, at first, I was a little squeamish about this. It sounded too much like something that would happen in some war-torn Middle Eastern country. An army led by this faction or that faction takes over a territory and then starts destroying things to erase the history of those they conquer.
But the more I think about it, I’m starting to reach a certain level of moral comfort regarding the destruction of historical icons – as long as we’re going to be fair about it, that is.
Let’s start with Robert Byrd, the long-serving Democrat Senator from West Virginia.
More than 50 buildings built with funds from U.S. taxpayers directed to West Virginia are named for either Byrd or his wife. There are schools and highways, too. Problem is, Byrd was the Exalted Cyclops of the local Klan unit he founded and recruited.
Oh, sure, he renounced the Klan in the late 1900s, but does that make his earlier antics any less offensive?
It’s going to take awhile to scrape Byrd’s name off all that stuff.
Then there’s J. William Fulbright, a Democrat from Arkansas. He was a devoted segregationist who signed the Southern Manifesto in 1956. That document, written in the U.S. Congress, opposed racial integration of public places. It was in response to the 1954 Brown V. Education ruling that determined school segregation was unconstitutional.
There are lots of things named after that Fulbright fellow, too. Not the least of which is the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, which offers research, study and teaching opportunities in over 140 countries to recent graduates and graduate students.
Gotta end all that nonsense.
I could go on and on ... and on. But you get the picture. Rocks and glass houses come to mind.
Never mind that it was the Democrats who were on the wrong side of the civil rights argument from the Dred Scott case in 1857 to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
But I have to give them credit. They’ve been particularly adept at turning the tables on Republicans and labeling them racists.
Sure, LBJ was president and signed the Civil Rights Act into law after Republicans pushed it through Congress, but one must wonder about his motives given quotes like this from his biography by Doris Kearn Goodwin.
These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.
After being the party of the KKK for decades, Democrats figured out that if blacks were going to vote, they might as well vote Democrat.
Next comes the “war on poverty” – a plethora of government programs that increased benefits provided by the government by 2000 percent from 1965 to 1974.
Did this create an entire class of people dependent on the government? Does reliance on government programs influence voting?
Yeah, I’m all for removing images of morally reprehensible people from the public sphere.
But all of them.
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