Quote Originally Posted by Agent Miles View Post
Ouch!

How does that saying go, "If you don't like the message, then shoot the messenger."

Fortunately for me, I'm told that saying is in the Loser's Handbook for Intellectual Cowardice.

So most of us now get the part about the legal pardon actually working as advertised. At least "for the sake of argument". The 14th Amendment proves the legal status of Confederates allowed them to serve as Congressmen, while actual traitors could not. So legally, a Confederate could only honestly be called a traitor from 1861 to 1868. (They were paroled from 1865 until the pardon, but "for the sake of argument".) Then, continuing use of this term would violate the restored rights and immunities they possessed under the 14th Amendment. They couldn't even be forced to sew a scarlet "T" on their clothes. Imagine liberals violating the civil rights of tens of thousands of people.

Now the deeper moral argument, "Once a traitor, always a traitor!", doesn't really seem moral to me. If the LGBTQ community builds statues to Chelsea Manning, can I tear them all down? Would Manning's statues get a pass because of the famous Liberal Total Hypocracy rule? It's a hypothetical question, because no decent human being would ever actually perform such a despicable, pathetic act. So the moral outrage only seems directed at these statues. The moral arguments I grew up with usually ended with "Live and let live" or "Forgive and forget" but not with "I'm going to get you even if it takes 150 years!". That sounds like vengeance. I don't see moral justice in talking ill of the dead. Undue persecution of the dead who cannot defend themselves also seems devoid of moral justice. In fact, blind hatred of tens of thousands of people that none of you could possibly have ever really known isn't moral, it's just bigotry.

Confederate soldiers became U.S. citizens again and got all the protections awarded our nation's citizens. None of them are traitors. Calling them such violates their rights under the Constitution, although the dead cannot sue you. That's how all those people get away with lying on TV. A supposed moral issue isn't an exception to this.

We as a nation didn't just pardon the Confederates, we forgave them. Two percent of the population had died in the war. Families had been torn apart and ripped to pieces. We didn't want to fight anymore. The nation wanted to heal and move on. Few knew the horror of that war better than U.S. Grant. He speaks to us from his tomb and the four words he chose to say for the rest of eternity are, "LET US HAVE PEACE".
But should Stonewall Jackson's statues be taken down?