Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine released the following statement today in response to Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s decision to designate April as Confederate History Month without openly condemning slavery:
Governor McDonnell’s decision to designate April as Confederate History Month without condemning, or even acknowledging, the pernicious stain of slavery or its role in the war disregards history, is insensitive to the extraordinary efforts of Americans to eliminate slavery and bind the nation’s wounds, and offends millions of Americans of all races and in all parts of our nation.
In recent years, Virginia has broken the back of segregation, become the first state in America to elect an African-American governor, passed a unanimous General Assembly resolution expressing profound regret for “the most horrendous of all depredations of human rights and violations of our founding ideals in our nation’s history,” and cast its electoral votes for President Obama. Neither America nor Virginians want to go backward.
A failure to acknowledge the central role of slavery in the Confederacy and deeming insignificant the reprehensible transgression of moral standards of liberty and equality that slavery represented is simply not acceptable in the America of the 21st century.
