I've not heard of this bill before, but I am intrigued by this:
No publicly owned monument erected, constructed, created, or maintained on real property owned by an agency or the State of Georgia shall be relocated, removed, concealed, obscured, or altered in any fashion by any officer or agency; provided, however, that appropriate measures for the preservation, protection, and interpretation of such monuments shall not be prohibited.
And also by this restriction on moving monuments to cemeteries and musuems under the guise of moving them because of construction:
Nothing in this Code section shall prevent an agency from relocating a monument when relocation is necessary for the construction, expansion, or alteration of edifices, buildings, roads, streets, highways, or other transportation construction projects. Any monument relocated for such purposes shall be relocated to a site of similar prominence, honor, visibility, availability, and access within the same jurisdiction in which such monument was originally located. A monument shall not be relocated to a museum, cemetery, or mausoleum unless it was originally placed at such a location.
I now see that the Virginia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans is pushing a similar monument preservation bill. (And I also now see that there's already some protection for monuments on public property in the Georgia code, 50-3-1(b)(2).)
The historian in me is largely against monument removal (or renaming), though I recognize that there are some instances in which that is appropriate (for instance when a significant part of the community didn't have a say in the naming in the first place). Steve Clowney has a lot to say about this, too -- mostly in favor of more renaming. What I find of particular interest here is that the bill would establish a strong bar to removal and thus stop conversations around removal. I have some more thoughts in this essay on "The Law and Morality of Building Renaming." I guess if this bill goes anywhere it'll be time for another article.
The illustration is a Confederate Soldier Monument in Southampton County, Virginia, which was relocated to a park beside the Southampton County Courthouse.
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