The Medal of Freedom is the highest honor of the United States. Presidents have given it to transcendent artists, makers of peace, and luminaries of incredible stature.

Against this august history, bestowing the medal on Rush Limbaugh is, in no uncertain terms, a travesty.

Despite the false equivalence arguments, the graveness of honoring this man in this way is particular and jarring. It is a direct and entirely expansive transformation of how Americans view peace, honor, and freedom. And it further reduces the whole spectacle to the very worst instincts of partisanship. Not simply through the ugliness of division or even the divisive rhetoric that Limbaugh espouses. But the ugly supremacy of utterly redefining freedom to mean whatever President Trump decides it means.

While this was pure spectacle–one man’s intention once again to transform our world by himself–this reminds me also of the far less pure parts of many places of honor.

The Medal of Freedom was truly for the best of us. Other seats of honor have been less scrupulously filled.

And as we wonder how to move forward with this singular anomaly; do we pretend Limbaugh’s honor doesn’t exist? Does a future president strip it from him—incurring the wrath of further partisanship? The threatened doubling down on making this power grab a true power seize? Are we left to simply accept this indignity?

These questions lead me to other terrains.

I think of all those statues and windows erected during Jim Crow to glorify, not freedom, but white supremacy. Statues raised by members of the KKK to honor the Confederacy and declare a new honor comes from white men and racial division.

My mind goes to the thousands of honors given to morally-corrupted people; the consequential men who used power, not to lift the spirits toward unity, but to division. Men whose sense of racial and gendered superiority justified the simultaneous rebellion and tyranny of human beings. Who declared war against their own country; one not waged for defense, but for supremacy of their values.

And those people who erected these monuments, not in the 1860s, but in the 1890s and in the 1920s, were frequently avowed racists and white supremacists. People for whom the phrase “culture not hate” was so clearly a lie that they constructed an even bigger lie to hide it: the myth of the Lost Cause.

Liars who continued to terrorize their fellow citizens with still more lies; the grotesque excuses for lynch mobs and demon-led acts of terror against their neighbors. Always the lie; usually about a young black man threatening a white woman. Never true, but the lie was consistent. Like a pall to cover what’s really beneath: they wanted to kill their neighbors.

Disproportionate Dishonor

As I think of these unholy monuments erected for the basest of reasons and with the grossest of intentions, I also think of proportions.

There are hundreds of monuments to corruption and division.

By comparison, then, we need thousands to freedom. Justice. Equality. Let us depict all of those who offer true expressions of freedom.

• Artists who speak to the souls of humanity.
• Poets who revealed the patterns of the universe.
• Healers who bring the breath of God into the darkest corners of the world.

Honor them, our true best.

Limbaugh remains the outlier.

Just because he is in the company of the greatest people, that doesn’t mean he resembles them in any way. He remains the illusion of freedom; a false justice born of inequality and immoral hatred.

His life of division and grotesque spectacle mirrors the convenience of his arguments. He’s an entertainer when he doesn’t want to be held to journalistic standards. He’s an operative for the Conservative Movement who can sink a politician’s career when he’s taken for an entertainer. Ultimately, he enjoys the power and none of the responsibility.

But his self-preserving double-standard matches the double-standard of his view of freedom. A view which is so much like those purveyors of Jim Crow tyranny who honored lesser men. Peddling unequal freedom—a view of liberty reserved for their kind. A promise stoked in the fires of disunity and ruthless vindictiveness.

But there will come a time, a time that is already dawning, when we realize these honors are unjust. That the lies perpetuated are beneath us. That we don’t need to hold onto them so tightly; even as we’re accustomed to them. Even as we want to want them. As we want to imagine our ancestors weren’t on the side of tyranny. Just like we don’t want to imagine our grandparents, heck, our parents and ourselves, are racists.

We’ll realize that these things we cherish aren’t our best. Just our past. And markers of our worst inclinations.

So we’ll let go of them, take them down and forget about them. Because we’d rather make room for our better angels. The ones who bring out our dreams, our compassion, even our willingness to sing a common song of hope and togetherness. And we can see an image of freedom which includes all of us at our best.