Opponents of gay marriage said allowing gay marriage would legalize bestiality and pedophilia. Specious, much?
The confederate statues in the United States shouldn’t be taken down because the people represented held unpopular, or even offensive, beliefs. You’re right, if you take down every statue of someone who ever said, did or thought something anti-humanitarian, there would be no statues.
The confederate statues here in the US must be taken down, for the following reasons:
- They represent the darkest chapter in American history (if you don’t count the slaughter of Native Americans, which apparently, no one does).
- They were not erected during or immediately following the Civil War. They were erected during Jim Crow as a warning to black Americans that they’d better not get too comfortable.
- And finally, they are being lionized in the wake of an African-American president and during the administration of one who has a history of personal and professional racism, one who rose on the wave of his racist dog whistles, and who has consequently emboldened the ugliest elements in our society.
The choice is ours now: To repudiate (sorry, Sarah Palin, maybe that was “refudiate”) this ugliness, or to encourage it until we are forced to say the only thing more horrible than “President Trump”: “President Duke”. I don’t want to live in a country that normalizes hate and neo-Nazism.
Do you?