Last week, The Hill reported that a Virginia school district had been sued by the state NAACP after it restored Confederate military names for two buildings. The school board in Shenandoah County had voted to change Mountain View High School to Stonewall Jackson High School and Honey Run Elementary back to Ashby Lee Elementary (after Robert E. Lee and Turner Ashby, a Confederate commander killed in battle).

With that greater subject in mind, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared last month on the “TimCast IRL” podcast, where host Tim Pool, asked Kennedy about activists tearing down Civil War statues. While clearly not a subject on the top of his list to discuss, the candidate deserves credit for addressing the controversy rather than ducking it, as most have of late.

When Pool specifically asked Kennedy about the tearing down of the statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, which was subsequently melted down, the candidate gave a pained but thoughtful answer.

Kennedy reminded the host that he grew up in Virginia, and that a number of Confederate leaders had never owned slaves. He then stressed, in part: “I just have a visceral reaction against destroying history. I don’t like it...If we want to find people who are completely virtuous on every issue throughout........

© The Hill