Tuesday, August 15, 2017

We need to pull down Rich Lowry’s statue: When a conservative voice bends to the mob and ceases being relevant



I gave up on Rich Lowry the moment he advocated the release of Mitt Romney’s tax records.
  At the time during the 2012 presidential campaigns it was a white hot issue.  And like so many of the so-called conservative intelligentsia, Rich Lowry melted under the heat. 

In his latest column Lowry continues to wilt. 
He writes:

The monuments should go. Some of them should be simply trashed, others transmitted to museums, battlefields and cemeteries. The heroism and losses of Confederate soldiers should be commemorated, but not in everyday public spaces where the monuments are flash-points in poisonous racial contention, with white nationalists often mustering in their defense.

More here

So in Lowry’s mind we need to yield to flashpoints that could change on a moment’s notice?  Sounds very much like accommodation begging to be liked instead of standing firm for a belief.  Give up the tax records and give up the Confederate monuments.  And when the mob wants to blow up the White House because it was built by slave labor, or tear down the Washington monument because he owned slaves, what will Rich Lowry say then?  Oh, wait a minute that’s different! 

I don’t have a dog in the fight.  I’m not a Southerner.  But, I have a problem with limiting free speech.  And in my opinion these statues are a form of speech.  You may not like it but one is free to stand in front of any statue and say why you think the person was a miserable human being.  Others may say different.  However, taking the statue down is a bad first step toward taking everything else down.  Free speech is gone!    

Ronald Reagan believed the National Review was required reading at the White House.  But, with Rich Lowry running the show, those days are long gone, like the Confederate monuments. 

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