Tom Kirby-Smith: Government overreach

As many people realize, whether they agree or not with what’s being done, the North Carolina General Assembly has been making itself felt in many local governments. Instead of just making laws, it has been trying to remake the entire state to suit itself.

Among the many things it has set out to do is passing a law prohibiting the removal of monuments. The purpose is to preserve a reverence for the past, whether everything in the past is worth hanging onto or not.

Suppose that the government of the United States were to try to assert a similar authority, mandating that remnants of the past that it disapproved of were to be removed.

Suppose that a display of the Confederate battle flag were to be made a crime, as a display of the Nazi flag in Germany is a crime. Suppose that all Confederate monuments were to be declared remembrances of an illegal rebellion. Suppose that the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans were to be jailed for subversive activities.

In attempting to dictate decisions of our local governments regarding comparable things, that is somewhat the way our state government has been behaving.

This story was originally published September 5, 2015 at 2:00 PM with the headline "Tom Kirby-Smith: Government overreach."