… A woman representing the American South, standing atop a 32-foot pedestal, lords above most other monuments within America’s most revered resting place. It portrays, according to the cemetery’s website, a “mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.”
This month, 44 Republican lawmakers cautioned Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the first African American to hold the post, that the Pentagon would overstep its authority by removing the memorial, and they demanded that all efforts to do so stop until Congress works through next year’s appropriations bill. The memorial “commemorates reconciliation and national unity,” not the Confederacy per se, the group led by Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Georgia) claimed. …