Thank you! Very few extraordinary men have totally clean slates of behavior. It seems a bit juvenile to condemn the man and everything he accomplished instead of condemning the (disappointing and unexpected by "fans") bad behavior as a part of that human being. The emotion about this subject never ceases to amaze me. Expecting our heroes to be saints is very concrete thinking.

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On Dec 11, 2012, at 9:18 AM, Steve Corneliussen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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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