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Ruth Ann Dailey: Judging our forebears — the never-ending story

Associated Press/ National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Ruth Ann Dailey: Judging our forebears — the never-ending story

Robert E. Lee was wrong on the most important moral decision of his life — choosing to lead the Confederate Army in the South’s war to preserve the vile institution of slavery — but he was right on one thing:

He opposed erecting monuments to commemorate the South’s “rebellion” because he foresaw correctly that these would prevent the nation’s healing.

Now the removal of a plaque memorializing Lee has ensnared a tribute to George Washington in the same historical house-cleaning.

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Given the temper of the times, you knew that was inevitable, right? Like me, though, you probably didn’t anticipate it would happen first in a church.

Leaders of Christ Church in Alexandria, Va., an institution supported and attended by George Washington from its founding in 1773 onward, have voted unanimously to remove from their sanctuary the plaques honoring him and Lee because they make some attendees “feel unsafe or unwelcome.”

George Washington. Father of our country and purchaser of Pew No. 5.

Consternation over Lee’s plaque I certainly understand, but what part of Washington’s life causes people to feel “unsafe”? His leading a revolution? Founding the world’s longest-lasting republic? Refusing to be king? Leaving the presidency after two terms? Retiring to an inherited plantation and freeing his slaves at his death?

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If moral purity precludes a memorial to Washington, then no mere mortal is worthy of honor.

That decision, months in the making, was announced the day after Pittsburgh stirred international discussion for the art commission’s recommendation that the public statue of Stephen Foster be moved to a private, “properly contextualized” location.

While I agree with many concerns addressed by the deliberating committees in both Pittsburgh and Alexandria, both decisions raise as many questions as they answer.

Once you start knocking down the giants of yesterday, where do you stop? What moral failing is serious enough to justify removal from the public stage? And who decides?

One of the complexities in both cases is that neither man appears alone. In the Virginia church, the simple “In Memory Of” plaques to Washington and Lee are affixed on either side of the altar.

Church leaders decided at the outset of their process (“earlier this summer”) to consider the fate of both plaques together because they were put up at the same time (1870 — not long after Lee’s death) and because they “visually balance each other.”

Is visual balance and timing more important than disparate moral impact?

I agree with the church elders that these plaques “create a distraction [from] worship,” the sanctuary’s main purpose. So why were they there in the first place?

Why were tributes to mere humans ever inserted into the very place where Christians go to encounter the divine? Maybe the congregation’s real original sin was undue pride in their illustrious social history.

As my dad once said to me in sorrow and sympathy, “You get to choose your sins, but you don’t get to choose your consequences.”

The church is now trying to rectify a mistake, but to treat both plaques as worthy of banishment is to say that Washington and Lee were morally equivalent. They were not.

The church is trying to acknowledge changing sensibilities, but with too sweeping a gesture it is actually failing to make even modest moral distinctions. Let’s hope their yet-to-be-determined “appropriate historical context” can fulfill the church’s mission to impart moral truth.

Pittsburgh’s statue of Stephen Foster, made by artist Giuseppe Moretti in 1900, depicts not just the composer — America’s first pop musician — but also a banjo-playing slave at Foster’s feet.

The statue says more about its sculptor and the prevailing attitudes of 1900 than it does about Foster himself. He was an early champion of African-American music, hesitant at first but eventually defying public prejudice. He showed moral and intellectual courage in his time. The statue doesn’t do him justice.

As with the Washington and Lee plaques, let’s hope Foster is “properly contextualized” — meaning, with the humility to imagine our forebears’’ moral struggles and to wonder how harshly future generations will judge us.

Charles Krauthammer — the wittiest and clearest-thinking writer in America today — believes it will be for our treatment of animals. For caging them, making them amuse us, raising and slaughtering them on an industrial scale.

I think it will be for our killing and “scientific” use of human fetuses. But I’ll gladly let Mr. Krauthammer have the last, cautionary word:

Our future judges “should refrain from moral preening. They will, by then, have invented abominations of their own. Humans always do.”

Ruth Ann Dailey: ruthanndailey@hotmail.com

First Published: October 30, 2017, 4:29 a.m.

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