“Some groups are very much out of favor. Among these are those who commemorate the Confederacy and its cause...”
nathanbedford, you’ve taken screen name of the founder of the Ku-Klux Klan. I don’t think I’d be particularly welcoming to you if you were asking to be in my parade with a name like that.
On the other hand, commemorators are generally pretty harmless and do us all a service by keeping the history tangable and alive. Besides, the Union commemorators would look pretty silly reinacting the Battle of Gettysburg with no enemy. It would be like having cowboys with no indians. Of course, in our current politically-correct brain-washed society, the cowboys would be the ones excluded.
Someone pointed out further below that we used to honor all our war dead, Confederate or Union. My father remembers attending a parade in his youth that honored the last living Confederate soldier in his town.
We used to venerate Lincoln’s words no repudiate them by our actions:
“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
NBF did NOT found the klan. It was founded in 1866 in Pulaski, TN by James R. Crowe, Richard R. Reed, Calvin E. Jones, John C. Lester, Frank O. McCord and John B. Kennedy. Forrest DID issue Order No. 1 in early 1869, disbanding the group: 'It is therefore ordered and decreed, that the masks and costumes of this Order be entirely abolished and destroyed.'