SOme people want to take George Washington’s name off of schools etc because he owned slaves.
So, should George Washington continued to be honored as the first President, or forgotten as a slave owner?
I think it’s kind of a silly controversy, because he’s the President before a slave owner, and he freed his slaves before he died. However, I am not black, and I do not have a history with slavery, so I may perceive it differently.
And if George Washington is wiped away from public places because he owned slaves, where do we draw the line?
This is what we call “revisionism”. Like most other things, it goes in cycles. It will go away by itself eventually, but not before a whole lot of dumb things happen.
Heck, no, G.W. shouldn’t be airbrushed out of the picture just because he owned slaves! Only people with too much free time would come up with something like that.
Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. So what? Does that make him any less a hero? Probably Abraham Lincoln picked his nose. Should we erase all those Illinois “Land of Lincoln” license plates?
And we KNOW what JFK was up to, in his spare time…Maybe we ought to rename the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, too.
:rolleyes:
This is one of the major sins of the “politically correct”- I call it “presentism”: it means judging those of yesteryear by todays standards. It is REALLY stupid. King Soloman kept slaves too, and treated women like property-- so what?
Washington & the Founding Fathers didn’t let women vote, didn’t evn consider it -who cares?
I hope that 200 years from now those PC idiots who judge based on presentism, are also judged just as harshly-- for not letting dolphins vote. 
Still, it is kind of interesting that the free country to my south won its independence from Britain and the freedom of its citizens led by a bunch of slaveholders. How Athenian, somehow.
Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. So what? Does that make him any less a hero? To me, definately. “All men are created equal” rings pretty hollow with the addendum of “But of course, people with dark skin are sub-human, and can be treated as property”.
This is one of the major sins of the “politically correct”- I call it “presentism”: it means judging those of yesteryear by todays standards. This is another topic that confuses me about conservative thought. I hear warnings about the dangers of “moral relativism” plus the statement that “God’s laws are eternal”. To me this would imply a consistent moral code, not “things were different then”. Thus, I would expect that religious conservatives, to be consistent, would either say that “Slavery is a sin in God’s eyes, and always has been”, or “Owning a person as property is perfectly fine with God, and always has been”.
If God now says that slavery is a sin, when did he change his mind?
I’m assuming your ‘God’ refers to the Christian god of the bible. I’m not a bible scholar, but I remember plenty of verses in there condoning slavery. From how slaves should be treated in the OT, to how slaves should obey their worldly masters in the NT and more.
Thus, I would not only ask “If God now says that slavery is a sin, when did he change his mind?”, I’d wonder who he contacted personally to make that revelation.
[The passages in the bible about the roles of women and slaves have always bothered me the most]