Posted on 02/04/2003 3:42:54 AM PST by kattracks
Washington (CNSNews.com) - A video presented at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington appears to suggest that former President Abraham Lincoln would have supported modern-day, left-of-center political causes such as homosexual rights, abortion rights and the modern feminist agenda.
One tourist from Wisconsin, who viewed the video in the memorial's Lincoln Legacy Room, called it "awful" and said the "political correctness of it is beyond words." Other visitors to the memorial told CNSNews.com they believe the video clearly implies that Lincoln would have supported left-wing political causes.
A National Park Service spokesman told CNSNews.com he was "reluctant" to comment on the Lincoln video because the whole issue had the "potential to be quite controversial."
The video features an actor who sounds like Lincoln speaking about the Civil War and slavery. He then leads into clips of Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington.
About halfway through the approximately eight-minute video, footage of modern-day marchers is shown over "Lincoln's" booming voice as patriotic music and songs associated with the civil rights movement play.
At this point, the video shows snippets from modern-day marches. A sign reading, "The Lord is my Shepard and Knows I am Gay" kicks off a series of visuals featuring left-wing social causes, while "Lincoln's voice" and patriotic music blare.
The other visuals include signs reading "Gay & Lesbian Sexual Rights," "Council of Churches Lesbian Rights," "National Organization for Woman" (NOW), "Reagan's Wrongs Equal Woman's Rights," "ERA Yes," "Ratify the Era," "I had an illegal abortion in 1967 - Never Again," "Keep Abortion Legal," "I am pro-choice America," a Vietnam-era video clip of a woman asking: "President. Nixon where are our men?" and a sign reading, "Who will Decide NARAL (National Abortion Rights & Reproductive Action League).
The video features the theme song of the civil rights movement, "We Shall Overcome," and continues with visual display of liberal causes, including signs reading "In Opposition to King Richard [Nixon]," "U.S. out Now," "Equal Opportunity for All," "Peace," "Hell No We Won't Go," "No More Lies, Sign the Treaty Now Coalition," and marchers chanting U.S. Out Now" (crowd chanting).
The video also features an excerpt from a Martin Luther King speech and then progresses into a banner reading "Pass the Brady [Gun Control] Bill Now." Pro-life demonstrators appear in the video once, in a brief clip where they are shown clashing with abortion rights activists. No other political causes that could be considered right-of-center appear in the video.
'Beyond Words'
CNSNews.com asked several of the tourists visiting the memorial what they thought of the video and whether they believed it implied Lincoln would support modern-day causes such as homosexual rights and abortion rights.
"I liked it... I think [Lincoln] would have [supported homosexual and abortion rights] because that's how Lincoln was; he was very supportive of the people. He didn't care who you are and what you are, he loved everybody," said Elizabeth Baksi, a high school student from Houma, La., after viewing the video.
Darre Klain of Baltimore, Md., also agreed that Lincoln would have supported today's liberal political causes as implied in the video.
[Lincoln] seemed like a very progressive, forward-thinking man, ahead of his time," Klain said.
But Paul Meisius of Sheboygan, Wis., rejected the video's message as he interpreted it, and he chastised the National Park Service for showcasing it.
"That's awful," Meisius said as he finished watching the video. "The political correctness of it is beyond words. I don't think that's proper. They are giving themselves credit to be able to say whatever they want about Lincoln's political views," Meisius told CNSNews.com.
"Our national monuments are being stripped of their true heritage. They are being uprooted and taken and changed. It's an atrocity that they are rewriting history in the sense that these people have political agendas," Meisius said.
Meisius, who was visiting Washington, D.C., with his wife and five children, believes the video is an attack by revisionist historians.
"The wrongness and incorrectness of this -- this stripping of the true essential biblical aspects of our foundation - are being replaced by political correctness," he said.
Angela Brewer, a program instructor for the Close Up Foundation, a citizenship education organization, denied the Lincoln video implied the former president would have supported modern-day, left-wing social causes.
"[The Lincoln Memorial] has frequently has been used as a backdrop for groups that seem to me to be liberal. I don't know that there is a particular purpose behind [the video]," Brewer said.
Gary Perkins, who coordinates exhibits at the Sweetwater Historical Museum in Green River, Wyo., has written about the difficulty our national museums face when presenting historical materials. Perkins believes that the National Park Service may be guilty of historical overreach with the video in question.
"We do not know what Abraham Lincoln thought of gay rights. We have no clue, he never talked about it," Perkins said after hearing CNSNews.com's description of the Lincoln Memorial video.
"We can't really infer he supported gay rights," Perkins added.
'Quite Controversial'
Bill Line, a spokesman for the National Park Service's National Capital Region, told CNSNews.com that the Discovery Channel produced the video for the Lincoln Memorial.
Asked if the video intentionally makes it appear as though Lincoln would have supported homosexual rights, abortion rights and feminist causes, Line was unequivocal in his initial answer.
"I have seen the video, and I don't know how you can contrive that out of it," Line said.
However, after specific examples of "liberal causes" were pointed out to him, Line backed away from his previous comment.
"I am reluctant, quite frankly, to say much to you because I don't know the whole other premise that you are coming from or the background or the fuller context that the story is being written in, and it has potential to be quite controversial," Line explained.
Finally, Line announced he needed to see the video again before he would have any official comment.
"It's been a while since I reviewed the videotape. Before I can adequately comment and give to you something you can use in your story, I need to go and review that videotape myself," Line said.
As of press time, Line had not contacted CNSNews.com with further comment on the video.
'Left-wing gestapo'
Cultural critic David Horowitz was not surprised by the description of the video that CNSNews.com provided. Horowitz believes that left-wing political perspectives are the dominant philosophy of the curators of the U.S.'s national monuments. Horowitz, a former 1960s radical, is co-founder of the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of the Popular Culture.
"The whole museum field has been taken over by the left wing Gestapo," Horowitz said.
"People have to wake up. This is the America hating left. It is in charge of our national monuments. It's a disgrace and testament to how the academic history profession is totally dominated by the political left," Horowitz said.
E-mail a news tip to Marc Morano.
Send a Letter to the Editor about this article.
When you give the Negro these rights," he [Lincoln] said, "when you put a gun in his hands, it prophesies something more: it foretells that he is to have the full enjoyment of his liberty and his manhood."
"it is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers."
4/11/65
Lincoln's ideas changed.
You've see all this before. Who are you trying to impress?
Walt
Mansfield and Sabine Pass say otherwise.
No objective person will think so.
Walt
Have you watched the news ONCE since 9/11/2001? Or do you think it's 1863 and not 2003. Get a frickin' life....the south lost and there's not a hell of a lot you can do to change that, so feel free to rejoin reality and get on the winning side of a conflict which threatens not only the USA, but the western world.
To be honest, I never even heard of the battle of Mansfield.
I see the Union general was "Commisary" Banks. That tells you how much importance the federals put into the operation.
From a website:
Result(s):
Confederate victory
Location: DeSoto Parish
Campaign: Red River Campaign (1864)
Date(s): April 8, 1864
Principal Commanders: Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks [US]; Maj. Gen. Richard Taylor [CS]
Forces Engaged: Banks's Red River Expeditionary Force [US]; District of West Louisiana (two divisions) [CS]
Estimated Casualties: 4,400 total (US 2,900; CS 1,500)
http://americancivilwar.com/statepic/la/la018.html
I see total casualties as 4,400.
It was not a major battle. But it does show how irrationally you pursue your bogus points.
Excepting Chickamauga, the rebels had no major successes outside Virginia throughout the whole war.
Walt
They are really sort of pitiful.
Walt
Liberals send their children to private schools yet insist that poor minority children stay on the public school plantation, a jobs program for otherwise unemployable NEA members.
Liberals live in gated communities and have little need for a gun but sentence the poor minorities to live under house arrest in their homes because of fear due to so much crime in the "inner city liberal plantation". p And the liberals would deny them, and when they can't ban them, they call for us to make them so expensive that the poor minoriies can not afford one. Remember, under slavery, a slave could not own a gun.
As liberals have fallen in love with the term "Chickenhawk", let's start calling liberals "Slaveryhawks".
They are for slavery, but they don't want to be slaves themselves.
I'd be glad to see you back -that- up in the record.
Walt
Like the theater in which it occurred, most modern histories neglect it. I think that sometimes it is called "sabine crossroads," which you may have seen.
I see the Union general was "Commisary" Banks. That tells you how much importance the federals put into the operation.
He happened to be the commander in New Orleans at the time. In fact, Banks wanted to salvage another of his faltering expeditions up the gulf coast at the time when the command from Washington decided they needed to invade Texas from the Red River. Washington put together an army of 45,000 men for the expedition then assembled 58 warships to navigate up the river - the largest inland navy ever assembled on the north american continent. They finally got banks to go back to Louisiana and, as commander there, he became the head of the expedition.
I see total casualties as 4,400. It was not a major battle.
Its combatants totaled over 40,000. That is a major battle, Walt. The confederate victory destroyed the Red River campaign, leading to the retreat and dispersement of a 45,000 man army and a 58 ship fleet. That is a major result from any battle.
Excepting Chickamauga, the rebels had no major successes outside Virginia throughout the whole war.
Lie all you like, Mansfield and Sabine Pass say otherwise.
The website for the Mansfield battlefield and most of the histories of civil war Texas I have read. There's also a quote from General Banks out there who says his purpose was to close the "backdoor of the confederacy" or something of the sort and put its goods (meaning cotton) toward the union cause.
I make a joke or two and you give me a lecture about "rejoining reality"? Obviously you are the one divorced from reality.
Lincoln clearly declares you wrong. In his last speech he makes mention of people who were discussing it, and that had criticized him in regards to the matter. Lincoln says that you are wrong.
President Lincoln might well have become a strong proponent of universal black sufferage since he was already a supporter of the concept of sufferage to begin with.
LOL - that's excuse making that completely ignores the historical record. The man separated himself from those that DID advocate total suffrage. Lincoln's stated opinion just days before he died was that personally, he preferred exclusionary and conditional versions of black suffrage. He said that in response to some of his political opponents who favored full rights for blacks, and he said it in order to separate himself from them and their views.
As a stronger leader than Johnson, he may have been able to block the worst aspects of Reconstruction from the Congress, and talk the southern states out of the worst of their black laws.
Lincoln's avowed positions on 'reconstruction' would have ruined him. The radicals would have destroyed him for his leniency, just as they did Johnson. Withhout the bullet from Booth, there would be no temple for The Lincoln, he would have ended up a disgraced and impeached president by the time they got through with him, and things would have happened pretty much the way they did. If Lincon could have destroyed them first, then history may have been different.
You've been reading DiLorenzo again, haven't you? It was the southern states who perfected them long before the rebellion, and who perpetuated them into the last half of the 20th century.
LOL - I got that info from an African-American History webpage. Northern racism is a well documented fact of history. Except by hatemongering revisionist liars like that idiot Jaffa, of course.
In 1805 the Virginia legislature passed a piece of legislation called the Virginia Manumission Law. That law required that any slave freed in Virginia had to leave the state within 12 months or else they could be sold back into slavery. The law proved so popular it was soon incorporated into the state Constitution. An 1822 Mississippi law required legislature approval for all acts of manumission regardless of reason. The Alabama legislature seriously debated a law that would allow the state to deport all free blacks to Africa and bill the county that they were living in for their passage. Every southern state passed a law at one time or another that forbade free blacks from moving into the state and South Carolina even had a law that prevented blacks and whites from looking out the same window. So please to parade that bullsh*t about the North inventing Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. The North was far from perfect but the south came into their own bigotry all on their own.
LOL - I got that info from an African-American History webpage. Northern racism is a well documented fact of history. Except by hatemongering revisionist liars like that idiot Jaffa, of course.
You don't want to know. I am a compassionate conservative.
So you deny that Bill Clinton was our first Black President? That is not revisionist history my son. That is your history perveted as he was.
Northern racism is undisputed. But it was not the source of, or the inspirtation for, the southern Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. The south had been enacting such laws for generations. You didn't need the North for that.
Located here . I stand corrected on the date.
Southern racism is undisputed.
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