A candidate for governor of South Carolina is calling on law enforcement and prosecutors in the Palmetto State to “enforce the laws against vandalism of our public monuments.”
Philip Mathews Chaney of Fair Play, S.C. wants county sheriffs, police chiefs, solicitors, judges and magistrates to ensure that Confederate markers and monuments protected by the state’s Heritage Act are also protected literally.
“The individuals responsible for destruction of public property are criminals, pure and simple,” Chaney said in a statement. “They should be apprehended, incarcerated, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law, irrespective of age, gender, ethnicity, or country of national origin.”
A retired public librarian, Cheney is the lieutenant commander of a local Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) camp. The SCV is a national organization comprised of the descendants of soldiers who served in the Confederate Army during the War Between the States from 1861 to 1865.
Passed in 2000, the Heritage Act was the vehicle by which Confederate flags were removed from the dome of the S.C. State House and the chambers of the S.C. General Assembly as part of a bipartisan, bi-racial compromise. In the late spring of 2015, this law was amended to allow lawmakers to remove the Confederate flag from the north lawn of the S.C. State House – where it was placed following the 2000 compromise.
This was a one-time exception, though, and powerful Speaker of the House Jay Lucas made it clear at the time he would abide no further historical sanitization.
Lucas has been as good as his word on that front, too.
The Heritage Act holds that “any monument, marker, memorial, school, or street erected or named in honor of the Confederacy or the civil rights movement located on any municipal, county, or state property shall not be removed, changed, or renamed without the enactment of a joint resolution by a two-thirds vote of the membership of each house of the General Assembly.”
In other words, any attempt to take down a Confederate flag – or remove a Southern history icon – faces a difficult hurdle in the Palmetto State.
Good. This news site has made its views on historical sanitization perfectly clear on repeated occasions in the past.
“We ardently oppose any revisionist attempt to erase or sanitize history,” we wrote just last month.
While we supported removing the Confederate flag from a position of perceived sovereignty on the State House grounds (arguing it never should have been raised there in the first place), destroying monuments and other historical artifacts in the name of “tolerance” is just wrong.
We’re not the only ones who feel that way, either …
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