Hattip Neo_Prodigy:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/23/tea-party-tennessee-textbooks-slavery_n_1224157.html
It's predictable that the Freedom Party, purely about balancing the budget and promoting freedom decides that the best way to promote freedom is to rehabilitate the parasitical idle, effete, rapist evil institution of slavery. There is no possible means for this to be acceptable in modern society. There is no sunny side to an institution soaked in bloodshed, which had no concept whatsoever of consent. There is no possible means to rehabilitate an institution that treated human beings from cradle to grave as not human beings, but the legal and moral equivalent of VCRs. And there is no reason in any variant of Heaven or Hell for Southern white people to romanticize and whitewash the institution that broke the South, that ruined it, that kept it a miserable dirt-poor wretched hive of racist bitter clingers who nostalgized a catastrophic lost war. Slavery retarded the South's growth, it ensured that Southern whites *accepted* that the most fundamental building bloc of society is that some humans are not human, and to treat them with whips that make their back a sinister artistic pattern on top of that.
There is no reason whatsoever in 2013 for this to be acceptable. The only thing that it proves is that the conservatarian definition of 'liberty' in the United States, at least, has plenty of room to approve of slavery, and racially based slavery at that. Even in the 2010s, 150 years after that institution drowned in the blood it called up to preserve itself.
It's predictable that the Freedom Party, purely about balancing the budget and promoting freedom decides that the best way to promote freedom is to rehabilitate the parasitical idle, effete, rapist evil institution of slavery. There is no possible means for this to be acceptable in modern society. There is no sunny side to an institution soaked in bloodshed, which had no concept whatsoever of consent. There is no possible means to rehabilitate an institution that treated human beings from cradle to grave as not human beings, but the legal and moral equivalent of VCRs. And there is no reason in any variant of Heaven or Hell for Southern white people to romanticize and whitewash the institution that broke the South, that ruined it, that kept it a miserable dirt-poor wretched hive of racist bitter clingers who nostalgized a catastrophic lost war. Slavery retarded the South's growth, it ensured that Southern whites *accepted* that the most fundamental building bloc of society is that some humans are not human, and to treat them with whips that make their back a sinister artistic pattern on top of that.
There is no reason whatsoever in 2013 for this to be acceptable. The only thing that it proves is that the conservatarian definition of 'liberty' in the United States, at least, has plenty of room to approve of slavery, and racially based slavery at that. Even in the 2010s, 150 years after that institution drowned in the blood it called up to preserve itself.