Regarding The Flap Over Confederate Statues

[Rev. Rye]

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Well, excuse me for pointing out that there are, in fact, shades of grey in the issue.

The issue is whether confederate war heroes ought to continue to be maintained in the public square rather than in museums or on confederate graveyards. Your vote seems to be yes.

Only if there is some legitimate grounds where they're worth admiring. Someone like Jefferson Davis, who stated flat out during the war that the whole point of it was to preserve slavery, and when he lost, denied it all, well, I wouldn't mind losing statues of him.

However, I see Lee's case as a bit more complicated, especially given that his views on slavery (since that is the big issue with regards to the Confederacy) were more nuanced that we seem to be willing to give him credit for. He was personally a slaveholder, but figured out that if giving up slavery meant saving the Union, he would have done so if Virginia had not seceded. He undermined the basic premise of the confederacy when he called for them to arm black soldiers, and he eventually figured out the whole thing was indefensible and surrendered in 1865. And in the last five years of his life, he didn't even really try to defend the regime he fought under. Personally, I would be fine if each major statue referenced the major problems in his worldview on a plaque.

You see, there's a lot of nuance to be seen here, and I personally see the inability of people to understand nuance to be a fundamentally dangerous thing.

And, for the record, that plan about having historians assess Confederate figures is to see whether or not they're worth keeping statues of.