A federal judge in Massachusetts scorched President Donald Trump’s Interior Department on Friday for orders to remove all exhibits pertaining to race, sexuality, and climate from national parks — and issued an order to reverse all of it.
U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, went into painstaking detail about the significance of the exhibits being torn down under the so-called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” order by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
“The National Park system … serves as a cornerstone of public learning, providing rich and informative signs, exhibits, and interpretive waysides on topics ranging from civil rights to environmentalism,” wrote Kelley, citing “the echoes of abolition in John Brown’s Fort in Harpers Ferry … the genesis of the modern LGBTQ+ civil rights movement at the Stonewall National Monument … [and] the retreating ice of Glacier National Park.”
The park system, she continued, is sometimes called “America’s largest classroom,” and to that end, “the Government’s stewardship of these park sites … carries a responsibility to present history in full rather than in favored fragments.”
Unfortunately, she continued, “Under the guise of promoting American dignity, this Administration seeks to share a limited history by ordering the removal of all signs, displays, and interpretive exhibits at National Parks that do not align with its preferred narrative, thereby telling half-truths.”
Similar policies have led to the Trump administration’s removal of slavery exhibits from the original Presidents House in Philadelphia, which was also ordered illegal by a court.
All of these removals, Kelley wrote in her opinion, add up to “government-sanctioned erasure and rejection of their histories. It strips the sites of the context that gives them meaning. It degrades the public’s trust in the government, as the Executive Order ignores congressional directives and carelessly razes decades of efforts in the pursuit of its unilateral agenda. These harms are, in all senses of the word, irreparable.”
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