The left have been trying to get these things removed for years.
Oooo since 2016.
Your side is fighting to keep them.
My side huh? Which side would that be oh great ideological swami?
The parties began to shift in the seventies and the bigots flocked south.
Jump up and down all you want, won’t change a thing.
Huh, who knew that Biden was from the South.
Just in case the president or anyone else needs a history lesson, remember that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are simply on a much higher plain by any standard than Generals Lee and Stonewall Jackson. It doesn’t mean they were evil men, and in fact
Lee worked hard to promote Southern acceptance of peaceful American reunification.
But let’s be frank, the statues to people like Lee and Jackson adorned in their Confederate uniforms were not erected to mark their contributions as peacemakers. Many were built in the 1950s and 60s as a form of defiance against the Civil Rights movement. That’s a big reason why the president’s bully pulpit shouldn’t be used to defend the statues, but to defend the legal process for removing or keeping them.
Rep. Pelosi also misses the mark by grandstanding the issue with her public release. As a former Speaker of the House and someone who has been in Congress for more than 30 years, Pelosi knows, (or should know), that the statues in the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall Collection are placed there by individual states who each get to choose two people they want to honor.
Neither current Speaker Paul Ryan, nor any other official not from those states, has the authority to remove them unilaterally. And as reprehensible as the Confederacy was for seceding from the U.S. mostly to defend the barbaric institution of slavery, responding to that historic barbarism with a public call to remove statues to score political points cheapens the legacy of all who fought to end slavery and crush the Confederacy in the first place.
Besides, why didn’t Pelosi et al initiate a move to remove the statues when she was Speaker of the House from 2007-2011?
There’s a similar argument making the rounds on social media and other places about
“whether it’s okay to punch Nazis.” The saddest part of that conversation is that it’s predicated on the complete disregard for the fact that physically attacking someone who isn’t physically attacking or legitimately threatening you physically is against the law in America and every other civilized place in the world.
Making it okay to punch someone, even someone wearing horrific Nazi symbols and goosestepping across a public street, basically endorses just the kind of behavior the actual Nazis used to come to power in the 1930s.
It’s more and more clear that we shouldn’t want to continue to honor Confederate leaders in today’s America. And it’s ludicrous to compare them to the true Founding Fathers. But we can’t trash the democratic process to make these kinds of cosmetic changes. It’s a pity both President Trump and Rep. Pelosi have chosen to ignore everything but rhetorical arguments about what statues stand for instead of doing their jobs to uphold the law.
But of course you don't have the sophistication to see that not everything is black and white.