The same federal judge who reinstated a temporary restraining order to keep a monument to the Confederacy in Arlington National Cemetery has lifted it.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Rossie Alston, a Trump appointee, came after he visited the monument and found that the dismantling effort hadn't disturbed any graves. He halted its removal over unsubstantiated reports of desecrated grave sites.
“I saw no desecration of any graves,” Alston said in his 18-page opinion. “The grass wasn't even disturbed.” The judge described the allegations “at best, ill-informed and, at worst, inaccurate.”
Alston added the plaintiffs, Defend Arlington and Save Southern Heritage Florida, failed to prove that keeping the monument in place was in the best interest of the public.
As Politico reports:
Cemetery officials sought to have the injunction lifted quickly. They said they are required by law to complete the removal by the end of the year and that the contractors doing the work have only limited availability over the next week or so.
In a statement Tuesday evening, the cemetery said it “will resume the deliberate process of removing the Confederate Memorial from Arlington National Cemetery immediately. While the work is performed, surrounding graves, headstones and the landscape will be carefully protected.”
The Pentagon's Naming Commission recommended the monument's removal last year. The commission has purged the names of Confederate soldiers from federally-owned military assets since 2021.
Officials hope to complete the removal by week's end.
Beyond the case's legal merits, the century-old monument contains iconography that perpetuates racist stereotypes regarding slavery and the Civil War. It is decorated with a Latin inscription that praises the Confederate cause.
“The phrase ‘Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Catoni' translates to “the victorious cause pleased the gods, but the conquered cause pleased Cato,” tweeted the popular conservative account @amuse. “This quote, authored by Lucan in his epic poem ‘Pharsalia,' juxtaposes the perspectives of the gods and the Roman statesman Cato the Younger. The gods, often seen as favoring the winners in historical narratives, are contrasted with Cato, who represented moral integrity and philosophical resolve, even in the face of defeat.”
Upon inspection, Judge Alston rejected claims by the plaintiffs that the monument promotes reconciliation:
He noted that the statue depicts, among other things, a “slave running after his ‘massa' as he walks down the road. What is reconciling about that?” asked Alston, an African American who was appointed to the bench in 2019 by then-President Donald Trump.
Alston also chided the heritage group for filing its lawsuit Sunday in Virginia while failing to note that it lost a very similar lawsuit over the statue just one week earlier in federal court in Washington. The heritage groups' lawyers contended that the legal issues were sufficiently distinct that it wasn't absolutely necessary for Alston to know about their legal defeat in the District of Columbia.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has arranged to transfer the memorial to property owned by the Virginia Military Institute.
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