Discussion: Groups Sue To Stop New Orleans From Removing Confederate Statues

Discussion for article #244010

Sedition…Treason…Bigotry…the three legs of the Confederate Failures…yet they want to enshrine these beliefs…America the Ugly…

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Plaintiffs have a First Amendment right to free expression, free speech and free
association, which they exercise by maintaining and preserving the historic character and nature of the City of New Orleans, including their monuments, and by using the monuments as the location for events commemorating individuals and events critical to the outcome of the Civil War," the challengers – Monumental Task Committee, Louisiana Landmarks Society, the Foundation for Historical Louisiana and the Beauregard Camp No. 130, a local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans – wrote in the suit.

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By a 6-1 vote, the New Orleans City Council approved a measure that would remove statues of Gens. Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard, CSA President Jefferson Davis, as well as the city’s Battle of Liberty Place obelisk, which memorializes a failed revolt by the Crescent City White League against the Reconstruction state government, according to 4WWL News.

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In 1891, the city erected a monument to commemorate and praise the insurrection from the Democratic Party point of view, which at the time was in firm political control of the city and state and was in the process of disenfranchising most blacks. The white marble obelisk was placed at a prominent location on Canal Street. In 1932, the city added an inscription that expressed a white supremacist view.

In 1974, the rethinking of race relations after the Civil Rights Movement caused the city to add a marker near the monument explaining that the inscription did not express current philosophy. After major construction work on Canal Street in 1989 required that the monument be temporarily removed, it was relocated to a less prominent location and the inscription was altered. In July 2015, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu proposed removing the monument altogether

“Considering that freedom of speech is at issue with these groups, I wonder if the city building a Ben Butler statue will solve this…”

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No shortage of irony in NOLA. The plaintiffs claim they have a “First Amendment right to free expression, free speech and free association” to monuments celebrating people and a cause that was expressly designed to withhold those same rights from a majority of others (non-whites) in the slave states. Also in terms of “the outcome of the Civil War,” they choose to forget that they lost.

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“The mayor’s office confirmed the city would hold-off on removing the monuments as the case proceeds…” And here I thought we had decided not to negotiate with terrorists.

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Why can’t the plaintiffs just buy a parcel of land and put all the statues there as a private park? It seems like that would be easier than having to argue that a bunch of statues are part of a streetcar line so they stay on (presumably) public land.

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I’ll have two spoons of those tears in my morning tea…it’s fucking delicious!!

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The drive by PC jihadists to remove all historical memory of the Civil War is repugnant.

Although yes, the issue that started and fueled the Civil War was slavery, 99% of the Confederate Soldiers were non slave owners, who fought to preserve the state’s rights of their states.

Was slavery bad, of course. However to banish statues and other monuments to Confederate heroes and victories is an attempt to create another right under the Constitution: The Right Not To Be Offended.

How pathetic.

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Nice idea if it is called The Civil War’s 2nd-Place Gallery of Rogues and Traitors.

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It was Tivoli Circle before it was Lee Circle and there was a carousel there before the statue of Lee. That is the actual erased history.

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Does that mean if I put a Klan hood and a feed bag on the statue in the pic I am exercising my first amendment rights?

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Are the Germans preserving the few remaining concentration camps to honor their “victories” or as a warning of man’s potential inhumanity to man? Is it not true that the leaders of the South were traitors? Your states’ rights cause is phony and was always used as an intellectual cover for very bad things, including Jim Crow and the denial of voting rights, even after the Civil War was lost.

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Only in the United States do we continue to build and defend memorials to people who lost a war.

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Southern Republicans: We would have put Osama Bin Laden’s statue here as well if he was a white christian. We generally love those who fight The Yanks.

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Okay, how about this? You don’t have to take it down but you DO have to chisel the words “Thanks for NOTHING,” on it in great big letters.

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The post-war one bugs me even more than the Confederate president and generals: “Battle of Liberty Place obelisk, which memorializes a failed revolt by the Crescent City White League against the Reconstruction state government.” Let’s just erect a statue to Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City while we’re at it.

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Well, gosh. Civil War. That glorious time of sedition, treason, and the denial of the processes of democracy as outlined by the Constitution. What’s not to celebrate?

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The Monuments that the City Council voted to remove were paid for and erected with private funds. Why haven’t any private organizations already paid for any Ben Butler monuments? If public funds had been used for the monuments,I could sorta understand the argument for their removal a little better.

It’s really quite bizarre when you think about it. They spend all sorts of money and political capital removing the real reasons for the Civil War from textbooks and rewriting the whole affair so that it’s no longer being represented at all as what it really was…and then they pretend that they’re celebrating the Civil War, but they’re not, because they’re celebrating this wacky rewrite of history they’ve manufactured. Fucking nonsense.

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Regardless of who paid for the things, they’re in public spaces which implies pretty strongly that government agrees that these traitors were persons who should be held up for public adulation. These were persons who fought in a disasterous war to maintain slavery and trash the Constitution, the forefathers of the KKK.

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