On Confederacy: Inform, don’t honor

Have you ever heard an argument so asinine that it insults your intelligence, such as: We need to keep the statues that revere John Breckinridge and John Hunt Morgan, locally grown Confederate heroes, so we’ll never forget the Civil War? By act and deed, both were traitors who committed treason against the U.S. by supporting and championing a rebellion bent on undermining the authority of the U.S. government. Morgan even led raids into Indiana, causing the deaths of U.S. citizens in the name of the Confederacy.

I support putting these monuments into a museum, patterned on the Holocaust Museum, dedicated to informing the public about the horror of the Civil War, and detailing the part each man played in the tragedy. But neither individual deserves to be singled out and honored in the way their statues are presently displayed. Otherwise, to be consistent, we should sculpt a statutory likeness to Benedict Arnold, our most notorious traitor, and place it on the National Mall next to the Washington Monument.

This story was originally published November 9, 2017 at 7:07 PM with the headline "On Confederacy: Inform, don’t honor."