By: Christina van Waasbergen

The Farabee Senate passed a bill on Friday prohibiting the removal of Civil War Monuments (including those honoring the Confederacy) from public land.

Josie Woodward, a senior from Liberty High School who spoke against the bill, believes that Confederate monuments should be removed because they are racist. “I think that statues and monuments should be things to honor things that had positive impacts and I think that it is doing nothing but giving racism and bigotry a platform that it shouldn’t have,” Woodward said in an interview.

David Poe, a senior from Liberty High School, spoke in favor of the bill. Poe said in an interview that he believes that those who wish to remove Confederate monuments are the intolerant ones. “These statues have been here a long time and it’s only because the issue of race has gotten a lot of attention in the last few decades and tensions are really heating up between different groups, some of which want to remove the statues, and I feel like these groups are simply impulsively removing these statues and not giving the other groups a chance to respond  and just hastily getting rid of everything that they see unfit, which is the very definition of intolerance,” Poe said.

The bill will now be sent to the governor for approval.