Federal judge okays reality in national parks

The Hill -  A federal judge in Massachusetts has ordered the Trump administration to reinstall displays it removed from National Parks sites over the past year as part of a crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) content and climate change information.

A group of park advocacy organizations sued the Interior Department, National Park Service and its leaders in February over what they described as an effort to “erase history and undermine science” at national parks across the country.

Judge Angel Kelley sided with the challengers on Friday, finding that the federal government’s action “sets a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization” while undermining the “integrity” of the National Parks system.

“The Government’s stewardship of these park sites thus carries a responsibility to present history in full rather than in favored fragments. Unfortunately, the Government has disregarded these principles,” Kelley wrote in a 63-page order.

“Under the guise of promoting American dignity, this Administration seeks to share a limited history by ordering the removal of all signs, displays, and interpretive exhibits at National Parks that do not align with its preferred narrative, thereby telling half-truths.”

.... The order deals a blow to President Trump’s effort to exert broader control over what is displayed at federal cultural institutions and historical sites, which he has accused of promoting “divisive narratives” of U.S. history.

The president signed an executive order last March directing Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to take steps to purge “descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” from all public monuments, memorials and statues.

The lawsuit filed earlier this year claimed the administration had subsequently identified and started to remove hundreds of signs from national parks, including exhibits regarding slavery at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park and signage detailing climate threats at Fort Sumter in South Carolina — an environmentally endangered site where the first shots of the Civil War were fired.

Kelley’s ruling also cited dozens of other examples in which information regarding the environment, abolition, immigration, labor, women’s suffrage and civil rights had been removed.