This policy is what you get when you have white flight from urban settings.
If somebody were to complain about an MLK monument calling it "a monument to
plagiarism and
womanizing," I'm sure most folks would view that person as being malicious or obtuse or both. Even if true, that is not why we erected monuments to his memory. We wish to remember his
virtues.
I have examined hundreds of these statues and read scores of the speeches given at their dedication and I have never seen one that its proponents say is a monument to racism or slavery. Not one. Those who say they are monuments to racism and slavery are simply up to something. Left-wingers from 1850s to today have been keen to talk about slavery and nothing but slavery because it provides cover for a multitude of their sins. Well, there is another side to that story.
Tennesseans fought because their state asked them to. Tennessee asked them to fight because the voters of Tennessee voted 102,172 to 47,328 (68% in favor) to leave the Union. The people of Tennessee, like those of Virginia, declined to secede earlier, but, when the president demanded they take part in an unconstitutional and antidemocratic act, they declined. In other words, the cause of the Tennessee was the cause of self-government.
Why? Some northerners (e.g. John Brown) had murdered southerners, including southerners who did not own any slaves, for example Tennessean James Doyle and his sons, whom Brown hacked to death with cutlasses (e.g.
Potawatomie). Many northerners later gave money to him to carry on his “
Kansas Work.” Republican officeholders, including the senior senator from Massachusetts and the Republican front-runner for president,
knew about Brown’s next attack a year and a half beforehand and
told nobody. Republican governors used their offices to protect escaped terrorists. And then a majority of northerners elected a Republican to the office of president. Why would any southerner, slaveholder or not, male or female, white or black want to live in a Union with people so filled with blind, indiscriminate hate?
Then the president announced a policy so directly opposed to democratic self-government and so contrary to the principles of the Constitution that the majority of Tennesseans refused to take part and refused to remain in a Union led by such men. The people of Tennessee decided democratically to leave the Union and asked Tennesseans to protect the state. These monuments are dedicated to the memories of those who answered that call.
I guess that is what I would tell them. If we do not come to some reasonable accommodation, then despicable acts of vandalism like this attack on a statue in a
Georgia cemetery will continue. Is a statue in a cemetery not allowed either? Or maybe a spirit of tolerance and forbearance is called for.