Feb. 1 statement by Georgia House Speaker David Ralston (R-Blue Ridge) re: earlier remarks by Rep. Tommy Benton: "I condemn commentary that would seek to reverse the progress that we have made in the last century and a half. While we are mindful of our history, the business of the General Assembly isn't in rewriting or reinterpreting the past, but rather to focus on improving Georgia's future. I appreciate Chairman Benton's withdrawal of his sponsorship of the legislation."
State Rep. Tommy Benton (R-Jefferson), in comments to the AJC published Jan. 29: The Klan "was not so much a racist thing but a vigilante thing to keep law and order, " he said.
“It made a lot of people straighten up, ” he said. “I’m not saying what they did was right. It’s just the way things were.”
On the Confederate battle flag and the state of the African-American family: "That flag didn't shoot anybody, and when I was growing up I had a couple of those flags. In fact, I still have a couple of them. It doesn't make me a racist, " he said. "Nobody said anything about black-on-black crime, and that's about 98 percent of it. Nobody said anything about family life and who's in the home and who's not in the home. It's always something else that is the problem."
On the Civil War: "The war was not fought over slavery, " he said. Those who disagree "can believe what they want to, " he said.
From the New York Daily News Jan. 30: A Georgia lawmaker is bizarrely trying to rebrand the Ku Klux Klan.
Georgia State Rep. Tommy Benton, a Republican, claims the KKK isn’t a racist terrorist organization but nothing more than “a vigilante thing to keep law and order,” as part of his latest effort to preserve the South’s history.
Benton made the inflammatory remarks in light of a new bill, introduced Wednesday, which he co-sponsored that would preserve the Stone Mountain site in Georgia, where Confederate leaders are carved onto the side of a rock and where the KKK launched a rebirth in 1915.
Benton said the destruction of the site is akin to the “cultural terrorism” ISIS is waging throughout the Middle East.
“I feel very strongly about this. I think it has gone far enough. There is some idea out there that certain parts of history out there don’t matter anymore and that’s a bunch of bunk.”
From Washingtonpost.com Jan. 30: A Republican lawmaker who says he's grown weary of what he calls "Confederate cleansing" is working to preserve the famous carving of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate leaders on Georgia's Stone Mountain.
“I’m tired of the anti-Confederate rhetoric toward Stone Mountain and any other Confederate monument that’s out there,” state Rep. Tommy Benton told the Morris News Service. “We’re entitled to our heritage just like other people are entitled to theirs, and there seems to be an attempt to do Confederate cleansing.”
He continued: “I refer to that more as cultural terrorism than anything. They’re attacking us for no reason at all. We’ve not done anything to provoke them or anything else. They’re very similar to what’s going on in the Middle East with ISIS that’s destroying all those mosques and temples and everything because they don’t agree with that history over there, so they’re just destroying it and doing away with it.”
Rep. Mike Cheokas (R-Americus) in the AJC Jan. 30: "A lot of the people in my district are sensitive to … how can I say this? Well, their ancestors served in the Confederacy, " he said.
“I have constituents that have family members that participated in marches in the civil rights era, ” he said. “That’s part of our history and a proud part of our history, but equally so I have constituents whose great-grandparents served in the Confederacy. That’s part of our history as well.”
From a Jan. 10 AJC story about state religious liberty bills
Virginia Galloway, executive director of the Georgia chapter of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, in remarks to a group in Ellijay last October: "There was some accusation that this was discriminatory in some way." "That is a lie. It's just not true."
James Esseks, the American Civil Liberties Union's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & HIV Project director: "Religious freedom is critical to America's core identity." "But we know religious freedom doesn't give anyone the right to harm other people. That's discrimination, not religious freedom."
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