Lawmaker Introduces Resolution to Honor the Confederacy While Making No Mention of Slavery

• Lawmaker Also Praised the KKK in 2016 

• ‘We Just Elected a President That Said He Was Tired of Political Correctness’

With less than a week left in the 2017 Georgia legislative session, one local representative is taking a stand for treason. Representative Tommy Benton, a Republican from Jefferson, introduced a resolution in the state legislature calling for April 26 to be designated as Confederate Memorial Day and the entirety of April as Confederate History Month. 

Originally reported by radio station WABE, House Resolution 644 describes the month of April as “the month in which the Confederate States of America began and ended a four-year struggle for states’ rights, individual freedom, and local governmental control, which they believed to be right and just.”

Until a few years ago, the fourth Monday in April was officially recognized as Confederate Memorial Day and celebrated as Robert E. Lee’s birthday in Georgia. Governor Nathan Deal removed that designation from the day and renamed it “State Holiday” in 2015 in the wake of the racially-motivated Charleston church massacre.

Representative Benton directly links his resolution to President Trump’s desire to do away with political correctness. He told WABE, “We just elected a president that said he was tired of political correctness. And so that was the reason that we were looking to introduce the resolution. We think that our heritage is just as important as everybody else’s.”

Strangely missing from Rep. Benton’s celebration of heritage is any mention of slavery at all. For those who know Representative Benton and his history of support for white supremacist cuases, this is no surprise. In 2016 Rep. Benton, who, surprisingly, was a middle school history teacher, defended his (factually incorrect) assertion that slavery played no role in the Civil War, and that those who disagree can “believe what they want to.”

Included in the resolution is a direct reference to Dr. John Pemberton, a Confederate soldier who held the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Georgia Cavalry and State Guard, and who went on to invent Coca-Cola at his pharmacy in Atlanta. One can only imagine what Rep. Benton is trying to achieve by specifically calling out Coca-Cola, especially since Coca-Cola has been a leader in advancing civil rights for decades. 

Benton has also become known as an ardent defender of the Ku Klux Klan, claiming they weren’t “so much a racist thing but a vigilante thing to keep law and order. It made a lot of people straighten up.”

The resolution has almost no chance of gaining any kind of traction at all. There are only a few days left of this year’s session and no one wants to get anywhere near Benton’s absurdities. The Georgia NAACP called the resolution “pathetically divisive,” which seems to also perfectly describe Representative Benton.

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Image: screenshot via YouTube