I intend to protest the actions of the Birmingham Taliban and their campaign of cultural cleansing at the next meeting of the Birmingham City Council.

The next Birmingham City Council Meeting is on Tuesday, 7 July, at 9:30 AM. The website states:

To address the council during its regular meeting at 9:30 a.m. each Tuesday morning, you must sign the speakers list. The speakers list is placed in front of the council chamber door, on the 3rd floor of Birmingham City Hall (700 North 20th St.) at 9:00 a.m. and removed at 9:30 a.m.

I invite those of you who can to register to speak along with me. My comments will run more or less along these lines:

I am the great-great grandson of veterans who fought in the Union Army during the Civil War. For myself, I have also been a life-long opponent of the Ku Klux Klan and the neoNazis, fighting them at street level, where it costs. My life was threatened by members of the Aryan Republican Army after I embarrassed the FBI into arresting them. I am also an amateur historian who has done original work on the Unionists of Alabama as well as the 55th and 59th United States Colored Troops who fought valiantly at the battle of Brice's Crossroads in Mississippi. In short, I am no neo-Confederate.

My question to the city council of Birmingham is this:

Mindful of the Park Board's proposal of cultural cleansing by removing the Confederate statue in Linn Park, can someone tell me the functional difference between them and the collectivist cultural assassins of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria? And if you ratify this decision, how can you look yourselves in the mirror, you volunteers in a new American Taliban? I realize that you are members of America's collectivist party, the Democrats, but this proposal seems a bit much even for them. Of course the ex-Confederates who put up the statue were life-long Democrats, so I can see why the Park Board would like to engage in some Orwellian "down the memory hole" erasure of history. But functionally joining the Taliban for a little down home cultural cleansing of a part of history you don't want to remember? When, I wonder, will you and they carry this campaign of cultural cleansing to its logical conclusion and ask all the white folks to leave town so they (and you) can "feel more comfortable?"?

History, in all its twists and turns, must be preserved, not sanitized according to the hysteria of the moment and that's what this is -- racist, collectivist hysteria. In your own way, you are as bad as the Klan -- by such actions you validate the Klan's twisted hatred -- and you make their job of recruiting the gullible far easier than it otherwise would be.

If you want to do something, why don't you commemorate the veterans of the 55th and 59th United States Colored Troops, some of whom moved to Birmingham after the war and are buried here? Put up a statue to THEM in Linn Park. For that matter, why don't you remember the black Confederates who fought for the South? Try building up the historical memory of history -- warts and all -- rather than attempting to culturally cleanse it in some collectivist, Orwellian hysteria.

If the City Council supports this decision of the Park Board, you are no better than the Taliban, the Khmer Rouge, ISIS or any other gang of collectivist criminals-against-history who would destroy what makes them unhappy.

There is no right codified in the Constitution to be protected against being offended, by history (which is beyond changing) or anything else for that matter. Deal with it, like American adults. Not as spiteful, collectivist Taliban terrorists with sledge hammers.