William Penn – the latest casualty of our culture war

The Biden administration’s National Park Service recently announced that it intends to remove a statue of William Penn from “Welcome Park”  in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The removal of the statue is being done to make the park a more “welcoming, accurate, and inclusive experience for visitors.”

In 1982, the park was constructed to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the founding of Pennsylvania by William Penn the namesake of Pennsylvania.  The park was named after Penn’s ship, Welcome, that transported him and other colonists seeking religious persecution from the Old World to Pennsylvania. Englishmen harshly persecuted the Quakers whom they considered to be dangerous radicals because of their teachings of social and religious equality. 

https://www.ushistory.org/penn/

Penn had high hopes that the colony would enjoy religious freedom, as well as peace with the American Indians who had lived in this land for centuries. Like all Quakers, Penn was a pacifist, and he was adamant that his new colony would avoid the bloodshed and war between Indians and other English colonists that had previously occurred in New England and Virginia.  Many of the  democratic principles that Penn  espoused were  embodied the United States Constitution.

Penn was not a capitalist intent on amassing wealth at the expense of others. But rather he obeyed his “inner light” for the good of man which Quakers believed to come directly from God. 

So, I ask how does the removal of his statue make the park more “welcoming and an inclusive experience for others.” The short answer is that it does not.

Matthias W. Baldwin – Wikipedia

The statue of my abolitionist ancestor Matthias W. Baldwin in front of Philadelphia City hall was defaced during the BLM riots with the words “colonizer” and “murderer” by a mob ignorant of this nation’s history. The mod may have been ignorant but those organizers behind them surely were not. They were  following the Marxist playbook to destroy God, Religion, and our history and heroes in order to create their naïve dystopia. So first, Confederate Statues, and now Quakers, it appears no one is immune until all vestiges of the past have been vilified and discredited to make way for whatever madness may lie ahead. Standing by to see who will fall from grace next, George Washington perhaps ?