Cheers for this Greg Laden. 🙂

I’m with Tyvor on this.

Pruning the outliers results in the more moderate parts of a society and its ways of thinking themselves eventually becoming outliers to be targetted for expungement. Unless care and reason are employed, at some point there is an impossible rush to rigid and narrow comformity.

Sooner or later such overzealous societies will wither and die.

It makes sense to get rid of the symbols of the Confederacy because the Confederacy was a direct response to the unconstituional rebellion of several slave-holding states from the American union and was based on and dedicated to maintaining slavery and even extending it. (One would have to be very naive to think that if the Confederate States had won independence, it would not have tried to expand into the land west of the Mississippi even as the remaining United States also expanded westward.)

Not everything about or in some way related to slavery in the American colonies and the succeeding United States of America can be expunged from language and history without lying to future generations about that history and losing the story of the great and ongoing struggle in the U. S. to live up to the ideals of opportunity, equal justice, and elected representatives of the governed within the government.