Statues of leaders in parks have less to do with history and more to do with celebrating certain ideologies and causes. A statue doesn’t tell you much about history, but it does honor the person in stone, and it honors what they are known for. Confederate leaders and soldiers are known for using deadly force in rebellion against the United States of America for the primary cause of keeping most black people in the south as slaves. These acts were traitorous, anti-freedom, racist, and anti-democratic because the south only seceded because they lost an election to an abolitionist named Lincoln.
Such statues should be removed legally.
“the National Park Service says it’s obligated to restore the Pike statue by executive orders issued by President Donald Trump”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/04/confederal-statue-reinstated-washington-00493394
“big problem with Donald Trump’s signature plan to create a National Garden of American Heroes. And, for once, it has nothing to do with culture-war bickering about just who should be included in the national statue display.
Instead, artists, curators and critics who have reviewed the recent request for proposals have a more practical worry: America doesn’t have enough quality sculptors or museum-caliber foundries to make this happen on Trump’s speedy timeline.”
We do need a badass national statue garden, but Trump shouldn’t be in charge of it. It should be based on bipartisan agreed upon heroes.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/05/31/trump-sculpture-garden-american-heroes-china-00372297
“back when a lot of Ancient Greek statues were made, smaller penises were seen as more desirable than larger ones.
“Ancient Greece was a highly masculinist culture,” photographer Ingrid Berthon-Moine, who created a series in which she captured images of ancient statues’ testicles, told Hyperallergic. “They favoured ‘small and taut’ genitals, as opposed to big sex organs, to show male self-control in matters of sexuality. Today, the modern users as in commerce, cinema, and advertising converted it into a mass commodity telling us about domination and desirability, size matters and the bigger, the better.”
Art historian Ellen Oredsson added on the same topic that people with larger penises were seen to be “foolish, lustful, and ugly”, while Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes writing of the ideal male traits as “a gleaming chest, bright skin, broad shoulders, tiny tongue, strong buttocks, and a little prick.”
Penises haven’t grown larger over the intervening years, but it is no longer considered unattractive to have a more sizeable appendage”