Rep. Foster,
According to your website you are a member of Hernando Baotist Church which is part of the Southern Baptist Convention. So will you honor any of the SBC's several resolutions on race relations? For starters...
In 1995, on the 150th anniversary of its founding, the SBC acknowledged its role in promoting and defending slavery. They further committed to eradicating racism in all its forms. That would include monuments in celebration of people who defended slavery.
sbc.net/resolutions/89…
Then in 2007, the 150th anniversary of the deplorable Dredd Scott ruling, the SBC repudiated that Supreme Court judgment and re-committed itself to building bridges across the racial divide. That's a chasm widened by the veneration of the Confederacy.
sbc.net/resolutions/11…
In 2016, after the Emanuel 9 massacre and the subsequent removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state house, the SBC encouraged churches to stop using the Confederate flag in a show of "solidarity." Wouldn't that apply to monuments, too?
sbc.net/resolutions/22…
As an elected official perhaps you can appreciate the initiative and the leadership of the University of Mississippi's students who voted to move this monument through on an exemplary model of democracy in action. It's past time to #TakeThemDown
The point is that your statement contradicts your own denomination's stated commitments and disregards students. Moving the monument is not "sugarcoating" history. It's removing the veneer of a saccharine South that sanitized slavery by promgating the myth of the Lost Cause.
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