The Commonwealth of Virginia removed the statue of consarned traitor and brooding old loser Robert E. Lee from its pedestal on Monument Avenue in Richmond today, more than a year after the avenue's other Confederate Lost Cause monuments were removed by civil uprising and subsequent city action. Governor Ralph Northam livestreamed that shit :
WATCH LIVE: As the removal of the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond takes place. https://t.co/ylZytLmLck
— Governor Ralph Northam (@Governor Ralph Northam) 1631102519.0
The Supreme Court of Virginia cleared the way for this action last week with two orders. One lifted an injunction on state action placed by a judge who just so happensto live around the corner from the monument. The other ruling addresses a suit brought by local ... people ... Helen Marie Taylor, John-Lawrence Smith, Janet Heltzel, George D. Hostetler, and Evan Morgan Massey which sought to invoke some law from 1889 to prevent Northam from taking down the statue. SCOVA Justice S. Bernard Goodwyn wrote, "While the Court appreciates that the appellants' Lost Cause fetishism includes many aspects of late 19th century America, this law has no bearing on the actions of the Government of the Commonwealth of Virginia in 2021." (slight paraphrase)
The whiny confederate tittybabies even pulled out a Hail Mary yesterday, seeking clarity from the court about the order, but the statue is down today. It's too big to move in one piece, so they had to cut it in half. Hearing that, we were unsure if it was going to cleave right between the horse's nuts or front and back like a two-man horse costume. It turns out they just cut Lee at the waist and left his legs attached to the horse.
So the world's largest collection of second place trophies is fully dismantled. The monuments rose in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in memory of defenders of slavery and stood to represent the continued white supremacist regime in this city and commonwealth: Jim Crow, the Klan, redlining, building highways right through prosperous urban Black neighborhoods, medical experiments on Black people and their remains without informed consent, Massive Resistance to school integration spearheaded by the Byrd Organization, putting a parking lot on top of slave burial grounds, annexation of surrounding counties to dilute Black political strength, JUST TO NAME A FEW. This is just to say, as we dismantle the symbols of white supremacy, we have much more work to do to repair the real damage done.
But let's not end on a such a sad note. Remember that even before he was a traitor, Robert E. Lee fought abolitionists as a colonel in the US Army, so he was always a piece of shit. How about a rousing round of John Brown's Body with Uncle Pete and the Wonkette Choir:
OPEN THREAD!
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LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Not his horse. That horse is the only good thing about the sculpture.