No cause for pride

Some people are asking where the removal of memorials to historical figures ends, citing the cases of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Surely it ends with those who took up arms against this country.

The president lamented “our” monuments, but they’re not ours. They’re the Confederacy’s. They’re memorials to a few catastrophically misguided people who asserted the birth of a separate nation and led it in an attempt to destroy the nation Washington and Jefferson helped create.

Wikipedia quotes historian Elizabeth Varon on that attempt: “Disunion connoted the dissolution of the republic — the failure of the Founders’ efforts to establish a stable and lasting representative government. For many Americans in the North and the South, disunion was a nightmare, a tragic cataclysm that would reduce them to the kind of fear and misery that seemed to pervade the rest of the world. And yet, for many other Americans, disunion served as the main instrument by which they could achieve their political goals.”

The Confederacy is long defunct and there’s no need for a proud new South to identify with its cause. I hope Kentuckians will consider Varon’s point. It’s expressed for the ages in the Gettysburg Address.

This story was originally published September 8, 2017 at 6:24 PM with the headline "No cause for pride."