Mr. Barger complained that Monticello's "emphasis...on slavery issues" comes 
"at the expense of Mr. Jefferson." To me that seems upside down. The 
emphasis in fact honors Mr. Jefferson.

Mr. Jefferson matters because self-evident but challenging truths matter. 
It's too bad that Monticello, like the rest of us, failed for many decades 
to begin elucidating and respecting the lives, dignity and contributions of 
individual Americans obscenely oppressed by fellow Americans -- including by 
Mr. Jefferson, the paradoxically slaveholding human-rights idealist.

If Monticello had continued its former Gone-with-the-Windism on slavery late 
into the last century, if the curators had persisted in obscuring Americans' 
lives on that mountain, it would have been the foundation's civic, 
historical and moral negligence that would have come at the expense of Mr. 
Jefferson.

But they got it right. Good for them. Good for self-evident truths.

Good for Mr. Jefferson.

Steven T. Corneliussen
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/
http://tjscience.org/
http://www.physicstoday.org/daily_edition/science_and_the_media

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