FALLS CHURCH CITY PUBLIC SCHOOL BOARD
BY LUIS MIGUEL
SEE: https://thenewamerican.com/district-to-change-name-of-school-named-for-jefferson-ignoring-community-opposition/;
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
A Virginia school board voted this week to change the names of two schools because their namesakes were slave owners — even though one of them was America’s third president and the other was another Founding Father.
Falls Church City Public Schools will rename Thomas Jefferson Elementary School and George Mason High School following a unanimous vote to approve the measure Wednesday.
“The Board took seriously the viewpoints and concerns raised by many students, parents, staff, and community members,” said School Board Chair Greg Anderson.
Prior to the vote, the school board conducted a survey to gauge the public’s interest in changing the
names of the schools. Only 26 percent of the nearly 3,500 parents, students, and staff members surveyed
supported renaming the George Mason school, and only 23 percent supported renaming the Thomas Jefferson
Elementary. By contrast, 56 percent opposed renaming both of them.
Despite this fact, Anderson said the change was “in the best interest” of students and “a necessary part of our equity work.”
“Our schools must be places where all students, staff, and community members feel safe, supported, and inspired,” the board chairman said.
Jefferson has been a constant target of the historical revisionists, especially over the last year as vandals associated with the Black Lives Matter movement have toppled monuments and statues dedicated to historical figures they deem “racist.”
For leftists, Jefferson is problematic because he owned slaves. Added to that is the charge that he carried on an affair with 16-year-old slave Sally Hemings, and went on to father six of her children.
But as TNA writer R. Cort Kirkwood notes, the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society published The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission, which showed the Jefferson-Hemings tale to be false. DNA tests did not, as widely believed, connect Jefferson to Hemings, and other historical research showed the claims of so-called offspring and descendants of the two were also untrue.
What Jefferson did do was author the Declaration of Independence, which justified secession from Great Britain and explicitly stated that God, not the state, gives us with inalienable rights that can’t be taken away by the government.
Kirkwood explains about other aspects of Jefferson’s legacy:
He also wrote the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, which Virginia’s General Assembly adopted in 1786 and which anticipated the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. “No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever,” it says, “nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief.”
… With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, he doubled the size of the United States by acquiring 827,000 square miles of territory from Napoleon for the meager sum of $15 million. The transaction included all of Iowa, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, almost all of the Dakotas, Minnesota west of the Mississippi River, parts of Texas and New Mexico, and Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Rocky Mountains.… Yet because he was a man of his time and one aspect of his life does not meet 21st-century sensibilities, the stunning memorial on the Tidal Basin must be demolished.
George Mason, meanwhile, is famous for refusing to sign the Constitution at the Constitutional Convention. One of his reasons? Because he wanted an immediate end to the slave trade.
Mason also led the fight for a bill of rights in the Constitution, and it’s heavily thanks to him that James Madison introduced, in the First Congress, the first 10 Amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights.
But again, none if means much to the Left, who ignore history and see nothing more than “racist old white men” upon looking at any historical statue. Unfamiliarity with history is why even statues of Abraham Lincoln and black abolitionist Frederick Douglass have been targeted by the “woke mob.”
Such ridiculous acts are not only a sign of ignorance on the part of the vandals, but show that the overarching agenda of the current “social justice” movement is to make war on all of Western history in order to replace it with an alternative Marxist history. It’s the same agenda that fueled the toppling of statues in the Soviet Union and during Communist China’s Cultural Revolution.
If the cultural pillagers aren’t stopped in their tracks, they’ll keep going until they’ve burned all America’s heritage to the ground.
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SEE ALSO: https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2020/12/09/falls-church-virginia-school-board-cancels-thomas-jefferson-n1200003;
BY ROBERT SPENCER
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
In a unanimous vote Tuesday, the Falls Church, Virginia School Board voted to rename Thomas Jefferson Elementary School, as well as George Mason High School, replacing the names of these Founding Fathers with those of people who are more woke and acceptable to the vanguard of today’s Cultural Revolution.
School Board Chair Greg Anderson, tongue no doubt planted firmly in cheek, intoned the usual pieties: “The Board took seriously the viewpoints and concerns raised by many students, parents, staff, and community members.” Except it didn’t, since according to WTOP, “a survey of the Falls Church community taken in October…revealed that 56% of the community overall asked that the names stay on the schools, including 61% of the parents of Thomas Jefferson Elementary students and 57% of George Mason High parents.” But their viewpoints didn’t count. As is always the case, the only viewpoints that mattered were those of the woke mob.
Not grasping the old adage that it is better to be silent and be thought an idiot than to open one’s mouth and prove it, Anderson rambled on: “We thank everyone who shared their perspectives with us and will be mindful of your comments as we now begin selecting names that reflect the diversity of opinions in our community” – except, that is, the opinions of the majorities who thought Thomas Jefferson and George Mason were fine names and need not be changed. “Our schools must be places where all students, staff, and community members feel safe, supported, and inspired.” Except, that is, those who respect and revere the Founding Fathers.
And so the foes of American history and America itself, for to repudiate the one is to repudiate the other, score another victory. If His Fraudulency Joe Biden succeeds in gaining the presidency by massive voter fraud, it will hardly matter anyway, but America can only have a future as a free society if its people recover a deep appreciation for its heroes and a pride in its achievements. In fact, that’s why the Left embarked upon its statue-destroying frenzy, tearing down statues not just of Confederates but of Lincoln, Grant, and even Frederick Douglass. They want to make you ashamed of American history so that you won’t see in America anything worth defending as the country continues to be assaulted from within and from outside, with useful idiots such as Greg Anderson helping on the destroyers.
Ahistorical myopia and ignorance of history as displayed by Anderson is a significant cause of the current outpouring of hatred for America. The war on Jefferson and Mason, both slaveowners, is just one small part of the Left’s relentless defamation of our country as a bastion of racial hatred and injustice. Leftist rioters and destroyers are enraged at Americans who are memorialized despite being slaveowners. They’re oblivious to the fact that slavery was not universally considered a moral evil at the time these men lived, and that this is relevant because there are very likely to be people in future ages who look at our times and scratch their heads and ask each other How could they not have known that was wrong?
Even more importantly, the Leftists are heedless of the fact that the movement to abolish slavery arose in Britain and America because of Christian principles that they despise, while slavery persisted long into the twentieth century in several Muslim countries because of Islamic principles that Leftists would rather be caught at a Trump rally than criticize. Saudi Arabia, a country based strictly upon Islamic law, only abolished slavery in 1962, and North African states including Mauritania and Niger only did so in the early twenty-first century, because of Islamic laws that the Leftist rioters would no doubt say it was “Islamophobic” to denounce.
In contrast, it was Greg Anderson’s bête noire Thomas Jefferson who wrote the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It was those words that led many Americans, long before the Civil War, to believe that slavery was not only evil in itself, but incompatible with the principles of the American republic. Slavery was ultimately eradicated in the United States by people who believed that Thomas Jefferson had enunciated the principles that made it necessary to wipe it out.
It will be interesting to see who Thomas Jefferson Elementary and George Mason High are named for now. Malcolm X? Angela Davis? Che Guevara? Mao Zedong? Whoever it will be, it is almost certain that the honored figures will be just as imperfect, and maybe even worse violators of human rights than Jefferson or Mason. But the Left is indifferent to the imperfections of its own heroes; its objective is not to find perfect or sinless people to venerate, but to turn Americans against their own heritage. In Falls Church, Virginia, it’s working.
