Kansas, Missouri House Republicans voted to bring back pro-slavery, anti-US monument | Opinion

Maybe they think Kansas didn’t bleed enough.

That’s the first thought I had Thursday when Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives — including every single Republican member in the Kansas and Missouri delegations — voted overwhelmingly to restore a longstanding Confederate memorial that was recently removed from Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

Removing the memorial made sense to me. Restoring it didn’t.

Why? Because Arlington is where we as a nation honor men and women who served honorably in defense of the United States.

The Confederacy, meanwhile, was an attempt to destroy the country in the name of slaveholding white supremacy.

The two ideas don’t really go together, do they?

Some misguided people think they do.

“Let us fight for the principles of healing and unity, which is exactly what this memorial was created to accomplish,” Georgia GOP Rep. Andrew Clyde, who sponsored the amendment, said Thursday.

That’s a funny way to describe a monument that — as the U.S. Department of Defense Naming Commission’s final report to Congress noted — featured a depiction of “an enslaved woman depicted as a ‘Mammy,’ holding the infant child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war.”

Which helps us understand that the Confederate memorial wasn’t merely an acknowledgment of the horrors of the Civil War, nor was it a plea for “unity” in any real sense of the term.

No, it was something much worse: a set-in-stone endorsement of the wicked “Lost Cause” mythology — an embodiment of the pernicious notion that antebellum South was a better, more bucolic place in the days when white people could own Black people and everybody knew their place. Or else.

Good riddance.

‘Bleeding Kansas,’ Show-Me State in Union, not Confederacy

The good news is that the House defeated the measure to bring back the Confederate memorial. The bad news is that 89% of House Republicans voted to support the losing effort.

That includes each and every GOP member of the Missouri delegation: Reps. Ann Wagner, Blaine Luetkemeyer, Mark Alford, Sam Graves, Eric Burlison and Jason Smith all cast their lot with the South.

Which is kind of darkly ironic.

The Confederate memorial featured Missouri as one of 14 states that were represented by the lost cause — even though the Show-Me State remained in the Union throughout the Civil War and the Confederacy formally included only 11 states. Why? The Defense Department’s report suggested the design was part of an effort to distort the record “by inflating the Confederacy’s size, support and significance.”

That’s bad history. It’s propaganda in the service of a terrible cause.

The unanimous support from Missouri Republicans, though, suggests the memorial’s original designers might have been onto something.

Less understandable: All three Kansas Republicans — Reps. Ron Estes, Tracey Mann and Jake LaTurner — also voted for the memorial.

I assume they know their history. I assume they know that Kansas was born as a free state only after a bitter, violent struggle between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces that was won by the folks who favored freedom. (That’s where we get the name “Bleeding Kansas.”) I assume they know their own party — the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln — was brought to life around the same time as a vehicle for anti-slavery sentiment in the United States.

And I wonder if they understand their vote to restore the racist, pro-Confederate monument to a prominent place in American life amounts to a betrayal of that heritage.

But I’m not surprised.

Today’s GOP is the party of insurrection. Elected Republicans lionize a former president who tried to overturn an election he lost, who now pledges to pardon the rioters who attacked the Capitol on his behalf if he retakes power, and who continues to hint at violence if he is held accountable for his criminal acts.

Which means that Thursday’s pro-Confederate vote probably wasn’t the last time this year Kansas and Missouri Republicans will throw their support behind violent rebels. It’s just more of the same.

Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle Opinion correspondent. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.