Georgia Republican: The KKK Made Blacks “Straighten Up,” Kept “Law And Order”
ByColin TaylorPosted on January 29, 2016
It is shocking to find that in this day and age, vestiges of white supremacy are still alive and well – and thanks to Donald Trump, those inclinations are acceptable in public once again. A Georgian lawmaker, State Rep. Tommy Benton (R-District 13), has had enough of the “cultural cleansing” of remnants of the Confederacy, and openly praised a notorious group that aims for a very different kind of cleansing.
Benton clearly has a very different interpretation of history than facts present. He told the Atlanta Courier-Journal that the white supremacist/terrorist group known as the Ku Klux Klan “was not so much a racist thing but a vigilante thing to keep law and order. It made a lot of people straighten up. I’m not saying what they did was right. It’s just the way things were” in a bizarre attempt to defend his controversial new bills.
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Benton recently filed bills to amend the State Constitution and enshrine the protection of Confederate monuments from the forces of political correctness, in order to ensure that the “heroes of the Confederate States of America … shall never been altered, removed, concealed or obscured in any fashion and shall be preserved and protected for all time as a tribute to the bravery and heroism of the citizens of this state who suffered and died in their cause.”
He also filed a bill to make Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s birthday and the Confederate Memorial Day public holidays. Benton refuses to accept that the Civil War was fought over slavery, and decried attempts to remove Confederate symbols from the public space as being “no better than what ISIS is doing, destroying museums and monuments. I feel very strongly about this. I think it has gone far enough. There is some idea out there that certain parts of history out there don’t matter anymore and that’s a bunch of bunk.”
What’s bunk is Benton’s argument. Daesh (ISIS/ISIL) destroyed ancient monuments erected by some of the world’s first civilizations, utterly irreplaceable symbols of early human achievements. However, if he wants to find remnants of the kind of perverted racial superiority that gave birth to the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan, he needs only to look in the mirror. The backlash against Confederate symbols began after nine people were brutally gunned down in a church by a white supremacist; one only needs to look at the Republican front runner or watch five minutes of FOX News to recognize that this kind of racism is still very much alive and well in our nation. The history of the Confederacy should be remembered, yes, but not celebrated. Rather, it should serve as a painful reminder of the crimes that white Americans have committed against minorities. Fighting a war over the right to own human beings is not a heroic cause.
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