(C) Florida Phoenix This story was originally published by Florida Phoenix and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . GOP lawmakers want to protect Confederate monuments; others call it a legacy of white supremacy [1] ['Mitch Perry', 'More From Author', '- April'] Date: 2023-04-05 Jill Pacetti drove nearly three hours from St. Augustine to Florida’s Capitol building on Wednesday to support a legislative proposal that could prevent what happened to her family three years ago: The St. Augustine City Commission voted to remove a Confederate memorial that listed the name of Confederate soldiers who fought in the Civil War, including Eusebio Pacetti, her cousin four times removed. “A mob came to our town and demanded that they take down a memorial to one of my family members, a veteran, and they did it,” she told the Senate Community Affairs Committee Wednesday. “And we had to watch it be taken down and hauled away 20 miles away where it’s not in a prominent location any longer. This bill will not help now, but it will help other people, the victims in the future.” The legislation she’s referring to is a proposal sponsored by state Sen. Jonathan Martin, a Lee County Republican who wants to protect Confederate monuments from being moved in the future, though opponents say such monuments remain decisive in 2023. The measure states that any person or entity that damages, destroys or removes a monument or memorial located on publicly owned property may be subject to civil liability, where they may be required up to three times the actual or compensatory damages. The bill also says that if a memorial or monument is relocated, “it must be relocated to a site of similar prominence, honor, visibility and access” within the same county or city of where it was originally located. There have been more than two dozen Confederate memorials removed in Florida since 2015, according to a 2022 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. There are 77 that still remain. The movement in Florida and the country to remove such controversial symbols was accelerated after the mass shooting at a Black church in Charleston, South Caroline in 2015. Shortly after that event, South Carolina lawmakers voted to remove the Confederate flag from their statehouse. More Confederate monuments began coming down in 2017, including in Hillsborough County, where county commissioners deliberated for months about whether or not to remove a Confederate monument placed in front of a courthouse in downtown Tampa. They ultimately did so, but only after mandating that the private sector pay for the removal and removing of the monument. The momentum to remove more Confederate monuments in places like Jacksonville, St. Augustine and Lakeland followed the protests over the death of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. The proposal would also allow any legal resident of Florida or any nonprofit organization whose purpose is historical preservation from anywhere in the country the standing to bring a civil lawsuit against those responsible for moving a monument. “The citizen’s standings provision in this bill is particularly important, because it allows citizens in Florida to go to court and bring some peace and order to this process,” said former Florida Lt. Gov. Jeff Kottkamp, who was representing the Guardians of American History. But others strongly disagreed. “At their core, these memorials honor people who decided to take up arms against the United States to maintain white supremacy and slavery,” said Jonathan Webber, the Florida policy director of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “And to many Floridians, they represent one of the cruelest periods in American history and our symbolic reminders of the racial social hierarchy that can still be felt today.” Dr. Carolynn Zonia said that a Confederate flag continues to fly from the Walton County Courthouse – where it was first flown in 1964, during the height of the civil rights movement in America. In June of 2020, the Walton County Commission voted 3-2 to keep the flag flying. “We just want the opportunity and freedom to work in a democratic way with our neighbors to find a suitable location for these monuments,” she said. Broward County Democrat Rosalind Osgood, the only Black lawmaker on the committee, said that there were significant “cultural differences about these types of things.” “I’m hoping we’ll get to a point where we have some really tough conversations to understand why different groups feel different ways about certain things and not hate each other because we feel differently. People that look like me really are offended by a lot of the Confederate monuments that we see,” she said, adding that “the whole notion of the ‘Lost Cause,’ which we believe was the start of erasing our history.” Ocala Republican Dennis Baxley, a descendant of a Confederate soldier, called the destruction and vandalism of Confederate monuments “the kind of thing that we witnessed the Taliban do, and I just don’t believe that’s the way that America is.” He asked that the public should have “mutual respect that anyone can memorialize the people that came before them.” “I think that this can be a step forward,” Baxley added. “Just mutual respect and may be force us to confront our failures in the past. Force us to say we have gotten better at some things.” “It’s not the point of history that I’m proud of, I know we can do better,” acknowledged Sen. Martin in asking his colleagues to support the bill. “We’re getting better as a country. There are presidents in our nation’s founding that owned slaves. That does not mean that they did not do some good things. They did horrible things but when I look at a monument, I don’t look at the sins. We don’t build monuments around the sins of individual people because of something great that they did. And I want to teach my kids, despite your imperfections, you can still do something great.” The bill (SB 1096) passed along party lines, with Osgood and South Florida Sen. Lori Berman opposing the proposal (the other Democrat on the committee, Sen. Jason Pizzo, was not present). It has one more committee vote before making it to Senate floor. The House version of the bill (HB 1607) is being co-sponsored by Republican Dean Black, who represents Nassau and parts of Volusia counties, and Volusia County Republican Webster Barnaby. The House version has two committees to go through before making it to the House floor. 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