Fox News Guest Has the Worst Idea For Solving Issue of Confederate Monuments
“Charlottesville is coming to a city near you,” Cheryl Chumly, a Washington Times editor and Fox News contributor warns in her latest editorial for the conservative website.
But do not fret, Chumley has a solution, which she outlined in an appearance on Fox News.
“Well basically, if we’re going to go about and tear down monuments because they hurt people’s feelings, they bring back memories of times that we would rather forget, then instead, why don’t we build up monuments that show the other side of the story?” Chumley suggested. “Instead of tearing down Robert E. Lee, for instance, why not put up monuments that the left would like to see?”
Chumley continued to note that there are black people that served with the Union in the Civil War, and some even served with the Confederacy — though she was careful to point out that those on the side of the South tended to be “manual laborers and cooks and so forth.”
“Next to Robert E. Lee maybe we could have Martin Luther King, or something like that,” she tossed out.
Yep.
What’s most baffling about Chumley’s suggestion is that she seems to think, as she writes in her Examiner piece, that it “should be met with agreement from both sides.”
As New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu writes in a compelling argument for removing racist symbols of the Lost Cause, “Confederate monuments were first erected as symbols of white supremacy,” and remain emblematic of such. The idea that adding a statue of Martin Luther King next to one of Robert E. Lee would placate the pain caused by such racist memorials is preposterous. There already exist countless of monuments the left is proud of, but their existence does nothing to temper the fury Confederate symbols — many of which were erected during Jim Crow to deliberately intimidate African-Americans — continue to provoke amongst those whose ancestors were killed in the name of a racist cause.
“I’m just suggesting that, let’s stop this madness of whitewashing history and tearing down the foundations of America and instead symbolically build something together,” Chumley continued.
Again, Chumley would do well to read Landrieu’s piece, in which he makes an important distinction between “remembrance of history and reverence of it” — and it’s not hard to see which side Charlottesville’s grandiose memorial of Lee and his stallion falls. What’s more, as many have pointed out this week: the Germans sensibly removed their public odes to the Nazis, and last time I checked have not forgotten the horrors of World War II.
And as Mediaite’s own Jon Levine wrote on Wednesday, the argument made by President Donald Trump — and echoed by Chumley — that the removal of racist monuments could extend to the purging of all historical figures from acceptable reverence, like George Washington, is a specious and dishonest one.
“Why not Thomas Jefferson? Why not George Washington? Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder, if we’re going to tear down his monument, follow that train a little further, we might as well tear up the Declaration of Independence,” Chumley declared.
What can’t be forgotten, in a discussion of the hatred that monuments of Confederate icons represent, is that those who fought against the Union — unlike Washington — were profoundly anti-American and unpatriotic. They fought against the United States in an attempt to preserve white supremacy. They were traitors in their attempts to secede.
An aversion to the act of removing statues, which Chumley seems curiously fixated on, is not a good reason to preserve racist monuments. Doubling America’s bountiful stock of public monuments addresses the concerns of no one, except perhaps Chumley’s bizarre statue-erecting fetish. That she was compelled to think up such a creative solution to preserve Confederate symbols is only evidence she has no compelling argument against removing them.
Watch above, via Fox News.
[image via screengrab]
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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
