Preservation group backs Gettysburg casino:

from: August 17th WTOP website…

“WASHINGTON – Proponents of a project to convert Gettysburg’s Eisenhower Conference Center into a gambling casino received new support from a surprising corner — the Gettysburg Battlefield Preservation Association.

The GBPA, which calls itself the nation’s oldest Civil War preservation group, said on Monday the Mason Dixon Resort & Casino project would help the local economy.

“Preservation does not exist in a vacuum. Our local preservation work cannot thrive absent a local economy that helps induce and support it,” writes Brendan Synnamon, GBPA president.”

Well maybe the good folks at Gettysburg should have thought about this before they decided to declare “open season” on Southern heritage.  In  October, 2004 www.boycottgettysburg.com  reported that the college planned on featuring the artwork of “artist” John Sims. Despite protests the Gettysburg College President Katherine Will allowed Sims to later display his artwork, quoting Wills:

“While artist John Sims’ work is understood as a desecration to some, to others it represents a creative and healing transformation. In a free and open society, all people have the right to express their views. [Gettysburg College] – all such colleges offer provocative ideas and events that stimulate criticism, self-reflection, and engagement in the issues of the world. Controversy in such activities is inevitable. As President of Gettysburg College, I affirm clearly and strongly our collective commitment to freedom of expression and artistic integrity.”

Below is some of the “artwork” that John Sims is famous for:

As outrageous as it may seem, this was not the first attack / smear campaign against Southern history and heritage in Gettysburg.  In 2002  www.boycottgettysburg.com reported that:

“The U.S. National Park Service has embarked on an effort to change its interpretive materials at major Civil War battlefields to get rid of a Southern bias and emphasize the horrors of slavery.

Nowhere is the project more striking than at Gettysburg, site of the largest battle ever fought on American soil, where plans are going ahead to build a new visitors center and museum at a cost of $95 million that will completely change the way the conflict is presented to visitors.

“For the past 100 years, we’ve been presenting this battlefield as the high watermark of the Confederacy and focusing on the personal valor of the soldiers who fought here,” said Gettysburg Park Superintendent John Latschar.

“We want to change the perception so that Gettysburg becomes known internationally as the place of a ‘new rebirth of freedom,'” he said, quoting President Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” made on Nov. 19, 1863, five months after the battle.

“We want to get away from the traditional descriptions of who shot whom, where and into discussions of why they were shooting one another”

$95 MILLION dollars was spent to rewrite the history of the Battle of Gettysburg and $35,000 was spent to allow John Sims to desecrate the history, heritage and valor of the men who fought there. And the Yankees wonder why no one is coming to visit anymore?

-Webmaster