Monday, August 01, 2005

Tiahrt wants to re-write history

Gov. George W. Glick



Attempts to revise history are being made by such US congress persons as Kansas Republican congressman Todd Tiahrt. All images of gay gatherings at national sites, including the Millennium March on the Washington Mall have been ordered removed from
videotapes that have been shown at the Lincoln Memorial since 1995 according to a civil service group. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) said that the directive came from National Parks Service Deputy Director Donald Murphy. Murphy is said to have been concerned about pictures in the video that showed same-sex couples kissing and holding hands after conservative groups complained.
In their place, the Park Service is inserting scenes of the Christian group Promise Keepers and pro-Gulf War demonstrators though these events did not take place at the Memorial in what Murphy called a "more balanced" version. So how are we supposed to teach proper history to students when our elected representatives are rewriting it.

Another example is Tiahrt’s push to switch, in the Washington DC hall of statues, from George W. Glick, a forgotten figure in 19th-century Kansas politics, to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander in Europe from Abilene, Kan. His only ties to Kanas was that he grew up in Abilene. He never returned to Kansas.“Every Kansan that I brought here had the same problem,” said Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), who spearheaded the effort to replace the statues. “They didn’t understand who these people were.”But Glick was no political slouch. A lawyer, farmer and statesman, he fought for the Union in the Civil War and was elected governor of Kansas as a Democrat.

So according to Tiahrt, if you don’t understand history, just re-write it.

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