First, they came for the Confederate statues… Now, they’re coming for the Christian ones.
A statue depicting a Catholic saint, Joan of Arc, in New Orleans’s French Quarter was defaced this week—with someone writing “Tear it down” on the statue in black spray paint. The graffiti has since been removed.
Local leaders were stunned why the statue of the 15th century French martyr had been vandalized—including Amy Kirk Duvoisin, who founded the annual Joan of Arc parade during the Mardi Gras season.
“Surely, people realize she’s not related to American history,” she said, but added that if any good can come from the vandalism, it’s the “opportunity to teach about” the life of Joan of Arc.
Likewise, a group that’s focused on removing Confederate memorials from New Orleans, Take Em Down NOLA, were also surprised that Joan of Arc would be target. The group’s founder, Malcolm Suber, told the media that his group had nothing to do with the graffiti.
“Joan of Arc is not on our radar,” he assured.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, a Democrat, has not commented on the Joan of Arc vandalism—but he has led the charge to tear down every Confederate statue in New Orleans.
“To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past,” Landrieu said during a speech in May, adding that “the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.”
Landrieu’s quest to rid his city of Confederate monuments has been highly controversial among his constituents—with a number of protests springing up in places like New Orleans’s Lee Circle, amid cries that the mayor is rewriting history.
The quest to remove Confederate statues first surfaced in the mainstream consciousness after a shooting at an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, last year. But it gained steam over the past few days, after the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia—which initially began as a protest to save a statue of Robert E. Lee.
Since the weekend, a number of Confederate statues have been defaced or destroyed in the name of racial equality.
But the fact that some liberals have already begun targeting Christian iconography is chilling—and suggests that the left won’t be satisfied with just removing Confederate figures from American historic memory.
