With every passing day, the left is making it more and more controversial to defend – much less celebrate – the South’s Confederate heritage. Soon, you will have to search high and low to find any politician willing to go out on a limb for the Confederate flag, the South’s rich heritage, or the icons of the Civil War. They will be marginalized to the point of obsolescence. When liberals set out to destroy something, they don’t stop until it is damn well destroyed.
Thankfully, there are still a few Republicans willing to reject the left’s inane war on history.
In Virginia, gubernatorial candidate Corey Stewart had to fend off a gaggle of liberal protesters as he stood up for a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville.
“The Charlottesville City Council is trying to erase history. They are desecrating the monument to one of Virginia’s greatest heroes,” Stewart said. “I ask all Virginians to stand with me to protest the Council’s decision and reverse this politically correct madness.”
The city council voted last year to remove the statue, but many Virginians want to see the decision reversed. They do not believe that celebrating a wartime icon like Lee is akin to defending the worst practices of the antebellum South.
“This is our heritage. It is our history,” Stewart said. “Robert E. Lee was a great American and Virginian. After the Civil War, General Lee spent the rest of his life working to reconcile and heal the country. He deserves our respect.”
But modern liberals have no such respect for the men and women who built this country. They don’t care about nuance or history. They have decided that every white leader before, oh, 1965 or so, was an irredeemable racist that should be relegated to the back pages of history. They have this unwarranted, unhinged fear of America’s past, and they think they can somehow create a better future by erasing it.
That’s ludicrous. In fact, it’s dangerous. We have to take American history as it is, warts and all. We have to stop pretending that the great men of history were EVIL because they didn’t conform to modern standards of social justice. We have to stop attacking the descendants of the Confederacy as though they played an equal part in keeping slavery alive. It’s divisive and it’s wrong.
But aside from Stewart and precious few others, there aren’t many prominent people left to stand up and say it.