Says the Washington Post, "It's fine that Mr. McDonnell decided to proclaim April as Confederate History Month; the Confederacy is an important chapter of history that merits study and draws tourists to Virginia."
I'm not quite sure it's "fine"; should Germany have a "Nazi History Month?" Perhaps, if the time were devoted to studying how such a fuck-up occurred and how we can prevent it from happening again. But instead, McDonnell's proclamation honors the terrorist group that styled itself the "Confederate States of America". (What besides "terrorists" do you call an organization that used violence to attempt to bring about political change, and opened fire on American soldiers in a time of peace?)
The Post continues:
But any serious statement on the Confederacy and the Civil War would at least recognize the obvious fact -- that slavery was the major cause of the war, and that the Confederacy fought largely in defense of what it called "property," which meant the right to own slaves. Instead, Mr. McDonnell's proclamation chose to omit this, declaring instead that Virginians fought "for their homes and communities and Commonwealth." The words "slavery" and "slaves" do not appear.
Even more incendiary is the proclamation's directive that "all Virginians" must appreciate the state's "shared" history and the Confederacy's sacrifices. Surely he isn't including the 500,000 Virginia slaves who constituted more than a quarter of the state's Civil War-era population, who cheered the Union and ran away to it when they could.