Florida’s Governor is speaking out about Jacksonville’s removal of a Jim Crow era Confederate monument.
Ron DeSantis ripped Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan in the wake of the Mayor’s Office compelling the removal of the Women of the Southland structure from Springfield Park, equating Confederate statues with those honoring American heroes.
“I’m opposed to taking down statues. The idea that we’re going to just erase history is wrong. You’ve seen it now where they tried to take down Thomas Jefferson, they tried to take down George Washington off schools. It just gets so out of hand. So I don’t support taking down statues, particularly if you don’t have legal authority to do it,” DeSantis said.
“I don’t know what the legal basis was to do it. I just kind of got a report on it, but I would not be taking down statues,” DeSantis added.
The Governor made the comments Thursday in Ankeny, Iowa.
Jacksonville’s General Counsel tailored his argument for monument removal around questioning whether the structure was even “historical” or a “contributing structure” to the Springfield historical district, a position based in local ordinance not making that designation clear.
The memo also notes that Gov. DeSantis “cannot implement an unconstitutional statute retroactively to penalize the Mayor from exercising her exclusive executive powers over parks under the consolidated City’s unique Charter,” a reference to newly filed legislation that would allow him to remove lawmakers who took down statues.
DeSantis has no comment on the legislation, but he has equated Confederate and American military history as being one and the same this year. He has said North Carolina’s newly rechristened Fort Liberty should have its name changed back to honor Braxton Bragg, whose legacy as a rebel commander was undistinguished even by the markers of the rebel army.
“I’m not in a position to say that somehow I’m so much better than any of this. It’s a different time. People make mistakes. There’s different parts of our society, we look back and can say was a mistake. But this idea that we’re going to erase history, I just think, is fundamentally wrong, and we’re not going to do that,” he said in Texas this summer.
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