Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) argued that while there was a case to be made for the renaming of military bases named for Confederate officers, progress could not be achieved through the trend of tearing down statues in the name anarchy.
The South Carolina Republican lawmaker offered examples of why preserving those symbols can be used to accentuate the positive.
“I think we could have a robust debate about how to deal with the renaming of some military bases,” he said. “There’s some things that we can have a serious debate about. But this desire to purge all of history because it was ugly or negative really does not serve the American people well. I go right back to the Selma bridge, which is actually called the Edmund Pettus Bridge because we preserved the reality of how vicious people can be by keeping it named the Pettus Bridge. That’s why it was so important to see President Obama and President Bush standing together in unity underneath that bridge to reinforce the fact that in America, all things are possible.”
“In America, we may have flaws. We may have challenges, but we get it together, and we come together to overcome those challenges,” Scott added. “And that’s why I think oftentimes preserving the history, as ugly as it may have been, can be a sign and a symbol of how good it can be. And if we want to do something, why don’t you put up a statue to Booker T. Washington. Why don’t you have a conversation about Washington Carver? These would be positive steps. Tearing down the history for the sake of anarchy is not how we make progress in this country. It never has been, and it never will be because we are the United States of America.”
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