Following Charlottesville, liberals and progressives have been apoplectic over Confederate statues, but now they’re going after any statue that they find is racist.
In recent weeks, the calls have been growing from liberals to remove statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and even Abraham Lincoln. And if you give radical liberals an inch, they take a mile.
On CNN, liberal commentator Angela Rye said that both Washington and Jefferson statues need to come down, saying, “We have to get to the heart of the problem here and the heart is the way many of us were taught American history. American history is not all glorious.”
She continued. “George Washington was a slave owner. We need to call them out for what they are, whether we think they were protecting American freedom or not. He wasn’t protecting my freedoms. My ancestors weren’t deemed human beings to him. And so to me, I don’t care if it’s a George Washington statue or a Thomas Jefferson statue, they all need to come down.”
MSNBC host Al Sharpton wants to defund the Jefferson Memorial, saying to PBS’s Charlie Rose, “When you look at the fact that public monuments are supported by public funds you’re asking me to subsidize the insult of my family. I would repeat that the public should not be paying to uphold somebody who has had that kind of background.”
While the Founding Fathers participating in slavery is abhorrent, we can’t forget that their personal accomplishments far outweigh their personal flaws. Both Washington and Jefferson not only opposed the institution of slavery, but they also put in place a political system that ensured slavery’s demise. Through Washington’s leadership, he ensured that kings no longer ruled in America. Meanwhile, Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence. These were both instrumental in ensuring that slavery no longer existed in the United States.
Then, of course, you have Abraham Lincoln, who if he had not been in office, slavery would not have been abolished forever. However, his bust in Chicago was vandalized twice in the last month, and people have called for its removal because they believe he’s a white supremacist. If Lincoln was a white supremacist, he easily could have been the worst one since he issued the Emancipation Proclamation and lobbied Congress extensively to pass the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery.
No matter where you fall on the spectrum politically and how you feel about the founders and Lincoln, their sacrifices gave countless Americans the freedom and liberty that we so cherish today. Their sacrifices are objectively more worthy of celebration than any member of the Confederacy.
