The problem with this logic is that we live in a society where, to use your example, some don’t eat beef, others chicken, others pork, still more fish, etc. If we followed your logic, we’d end up with a dinner of rice and bread.
I say put it to a vote in that municipality.
If enough people want it gone, then it goes. If enough people want it to stay, then it stays.
Whether it’s good or evil, harmful or helpful, artistically valuable is immaterial. If the hypothetical people of Faketown USA decide they want to keep a statue of Hitler beheading a nun, then that’s all the justification needed.
I like equestrian statues. So I’m for the next option: put some other name on the plaque.
I imagine some of the statues are pretty generic, but who’s going to recognize the faces anyway?
I don’t thing that just changing the names is going to make anybody happy. (Well, except people who are already ignoring the rider to stare adoringly at the horse.) Everyone would know who the statue is actually about before the clumsy change, so the conservatives would be insulted at the insult against the deplorables the statues honored, and the liberals would be insulted by the idea you could fool them with such a cheap trick.
Personally, I would be amused. Take the money of the racists who wanted to honor some Confederate douchebag and say it’s a statue of someone else entirely. I think most people would forget quickly who the statue was originally intended to honor.
Believe it or not, this also appears to be illegal under the same Virginia law that Charlottesville is challenging in court.
It also appears to be illegal to just refuse to maintain the statue and let it slowly crumble.
This is as succinct an explanation of the “tyranny of the majority” as I’ve seen.
I don’t think that’s how “tyranny of the majority” works.
The whole point of singling out various rights for protection against some sort of tyranny of the majority is because we’re concerned that the majority will vote to strip me of all my property – or to enslave me – or to execute me – or whatever, without so much as giving me a trial or whatever.
But whenever individual rights aren’t on the table – well, look, when the time came for our elected officials to debate whether to hereby designate one day of the year as National Pickle Day, we didn’t need to combat majority rule, because we could just shrug and say well, this is one of those times when there’s no reason to bother messing with democracy; as soon as someone’s rights are up for grabs, we should think twice about possibly-tyrannical government decisions – but this? Man, this right here is the stupid crap we can cheerfully leave to the majority.
Nope, only ordinary majority rule.
It isn’t “tyranny” when the majority decide they don’t want a statue of someone on public land.
It would be tyranny indeed if they forbid you to have the statue up on your own private land. But that isn’t what’s being described.
It’s hard for me to believe this law is, um, legal. How is this not an unconstitutional taking on the part of the Commonwealth of Virginia from the local governments? They can’t just say to those governments, “because you built X on your property, you aren’t allowed to change your mind and do something else instead there.”
I’d be interested to know the grounds Charlottesville is challenging it on.
How is a state law advocating for treason against the US government even acceptable to begin with?
If the monuments that were erected were designed to honor ALL Civil War dead, I wouldn’t have a problem with them.
My point was not that the issue of Confederate statue removal constitutes tyranny of the majority; my point was that a simple majority constituting “justification” of a decision regardless of harm (presumably to the minority) or morality is a pretty good definition of the term.
So, each state and each city should follow federal law to the best of their ability? That would be interesting.
The thing is, for “a pretty good definition of the term” you presumably want to use terms that mark Tyranny Of The Majority off as a subset of Majority Rule. Like, if I were to list a dozen different examples of majority-rule decisions, you’d be able to briskly relay which ones were mere democracy in action and deserved a shrug, and which ones were tyranny.
And the answers should probably line up a lot like this: should we name the new road Maple Drive? Yeah, that’s unobjectionable majority rule. But: should we ban all Jews from practicing medicine? That’d be tyranny of the majority. National Pickle Day, majority rule; Muslims don’t get to practice their religion, tyranny of the majority. Right? Can you draw me up a “pretty good definition” that does that?
Huh? What law are we talking about??
From what I remember about living in Virginia, the state legislature can do whatever it likes to local jurisdictions. To quote Wikipedia: “In Virginia, the political subdivisions have only the legal powers specifically granted to them by the General Assembly and set forth under the Code of Virginia.” Other states use a home-rule doctrine, which gives local jurisdictions greater independence.
I understand that (I lived in Virginia for nearly 30 years, and I’m familiar with the fact that Virginia localities can only regulate the lives of their residents, or tax them, in ways specifically authorized by the legislature), but there’s a category difference between these two things - between their powers as a governing body and their rights as land owners.
I’d still expect local governments, in their capacity as land owners, to have the same rights pertaining to the use of their real property that any private landowner has. It hardly seems legally tenable that, other than being answerable to their own voters, they’d have less control over their land than a private land owner would.
I’m not sure. Local governments are agents of the state. At a fundamental level, the state itself owns all property owned by a city, just as it owns all property owned by the Department of Transportation.
Missed the edit window: As far as I know, Hunter v. Pittsburgh is still good law in this area, and it actually deals directly with the takings issue: