Tennessee Politician: Take Down KKK Statue, Replace With Dolly Parton

Upon entering the Nashville, Tennessee Capital Building you’ll see seven bronze busts of southern white men…

One of those busts is of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was a slave trader, one of the first members of the KKK, and whose greatest claim to fame is overseeing the slaughter of hundreds of Black Union soldiers at what became known as the Fort Pillow massacre.

So why shouldn’t he be idolized in bronze and revered by legislators and visiting school children alike?

Republican State Representative Jeremy Faison is taking up the fight to remove the confederate bust and replace him with a history-making woman.

Speaking to The Tennessean, Jeremy Faison specifically proposed suffragette Anne Dallas Dudley or current country superstar Dolly Parton.

Who better to honor in the City of Country Music than the Queen of Country Music?

But the Capitol Commission, which oversees the building, voted against taking down the bust and current Governor Bill Lee also wants to keep it in place but said he’ll consider adding historical context to it.

Rep. Jeremy Faison retorted,

"Hitler has earned his place in history, but they don't put monuments of him in Germany anymore."

As a centrist-conservative Republican, I believe confederate monuments should be taken down and relocated into museums so they can continue to serve as a source education, but not as a source of inspiration.

Some fear by taking down confederate statues we will go down a slippery slope of eventually taking down monuments to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because they were also southern slaveowners.

But where I draw the line is between having slaves vs. fighting for slavery.

George Washington doesn’t derive his fame from fighting for a morally wrongful losing cause. He derives his fame from fighting for freedom, republicanism, and the United States of America.

Yes, he benefited from slavery, which he felt bad about at the time, but we are ALL a product of convenience and if you live long enough it will only be a matter of time before you have committed some egregious act according to future standards.

We make technology and technology makes us.

It is easy for us today to take the moral high-ground of acknowledging slavery is wrong because we no longer depend upon it for survival, but just imagine how future generations will think of us when they are no longer dependent upon killing animals for their source of meat (genetically-engineered meat), gasoline for their source of energy, or abortion as a source of birth control (they’ll have more effective means of birth control AND they’ll likely have stricter controls on genetic engineering whereby conception may serve as an important red line for distinguishing what is “human” otherwise without the government drawing such a line humanity will quickly evolve into many different subspecies).

George Washington was a flawed man, but he was a product of his time. And compared to his southern peers, he was a progressive on slavery by treating his slaves better and freeing them upon his death.

For 99.9% of human history, it was a common practice to have slaves (we are all descendants of slaves) and it’s only a recent phenomenon that we have come to believe “all men are created equal,” which it was George Washington who led the charge to breathe life into those words.

And it’s because he succeeded that we now climbed so high as to be able to look down our noses.