Every family has a Cousin Eddie; someone who took the wrong fork in life’s road and never turned around. If this special cousin was lucky enough to find a trophy wife short on standards and long on patience, the two might have splashed around the gene pool long enough to fill an entire branch of your family tree. God commands us to love Cousin Eddie, so erasing all evidence of his existence and ignoring his influence on your heritage is the pinnacle of arrogance.

Today’s ruling class is similarly attempting to purge all reference to America’s Cousin Eddie—slavery and the Confederacy. There was a time when history was as fixed as our sex or race, but in today’s world of unicorns and fairy dust there are no absolutes. As with Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal, anything can be colored or shaped to fit the new progressive template, so history is simply rewritten.

Although the first slaves shipped to America were Irish, racist progressives purposely ignore them to focus on the black slave trade. Irish indentured servants scattered and have so permeated our American family they are impossible to target and trap in dependency. Instead, America haters focus attention on black slaves and their ownership by our founding fathers as reason to dismiss our republic and the liberty she stands for. They are so wrong.

Framers of our Constitution recognized the hypocrisy of owning slaves in a nation founded on freedom, but they acknowledged complex problems do not have simple solutions. The Three-fifths Clause of our Constitution became the first step in America’s 74 year journey to eliminate slavery. Today’s leftists intentionally mislead by claiming the Three-fifths Clause proves racism; viewing slaves as less than whole. However, counting slaves as full citizens would have paradoxically promoted a slave’s value, thus disproportionally empowering slave state representation in Congress. Had slaves not been counted, the overwhelming political capital of the non-slave states may have settled the issue by ballots rather than bullets. This brings me to my point.

To properly judge our experiment in freedom requires recognition our republic has been shaped by decades of prosperity and brilliance, as well as periods of despair. It is the blending of these influences which refined the great idea called America. For today’s leftists to purge Confederate battle flags, statues of Civil War heroes or memorials of slave-owning founders cheapens the lives of Americans who died confirming Jefferson’s revolutionary idea that all men are created equal. Ours truly is the greatest nation in world history and it all began 239 years ago when 56 brave patriots signed the Declaration of Independence. We must never let progressives morph our 4th of July into a time of mourning because it truly is a time to proudly wave the stars and stripes and light up the night sky with fireworks. Let freedom ring.