Arizona Man Jailed for Defacing Statue at State Capitol

It’s the current mantra for liberals these days.

“If we don’t like it, it must go!”

How many news reports have we seen in just the past week about statues being defaced, beheaded, and torn down?

And these aren’t just Confederate statues!

Teddy Roosevelt, George Washington, Christopher Columbus – they’ve all fallen victim to the radical ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter crowd.

Now you can add a monument at the Arizona State Capitol to the growing list of destruction.

Last Friday, a man in Arizona was arrested and charged for dousing a monument in red paint near a Juneteenth celebration.

Fox13 reports:

An Arizona man, arrested on suspicion of defacing a Confederate memorial at the state Capitol, said he acted alone and did it to protest racism and inspire protesters, authorities said.

Sean Brennan, 29, of Phoenix, was arrested Friday near a Juneteenth celebration and charged with abuse of a monument and aggravated criminal damage/defacing a cemetery, KNXV reported. According to authorities, Brennan doused the stone monument with red paint, the television station reported.

“I don’t want anyone to think that it was, like, the protesters who did it and take it out on them,” Brennan told KTVK. “It was done before them, certainly, but not by them.

“I did the right thing, I did the moral thing, it just wasn’t the legal thing. We cannot memorialize racism.”

While Brennan has participated in some protests in the Phoenix area over the past few weeks, he said he did not on Friday.

Brennan said he did not plan to participate in the Juneteenth activities in Phoenix on Friday, but said he decided to douse the statue even though he would be seen by many people — including the police, KTVK reported.

“It was a calculated risk, and I knew that there was a 99% chance that I was going to get caught,” Brennan told the television station.

He was. Brennan was taken into custody by Arizona Department of Public Safety troopers moments later, KNXV reported.

“The criminal damage felony is a little ridiculous,” Brennan told the television station. “The cop who interrogated me said, it’s not like I took a sledgehammer to it. I didn’t even damage anything.”

The monument, a gift from the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the early 1960s, was cleaned with a power washer Saturday, KTVK reported.

Brennan said he had no regrets.

No regrets, huh?

Typical liberal mentality.

Instead of going about things the proper way, which would include public debate and discourse, they’ve decided they can destroy whatever they don’t like.

Unfortunately, the Tucson Sentinel reports that Arizona administrator’s have decided to look into removing the statue:

The Arizona Department of Administration is looking into what kind of process may be needed to remove a monument to Confederate soldiers at the state Capitol, but state law leaves the decision up to the agency’s director, and, by inference, his boss, Gov. Doug Ducey.

For years, critics have sought to have the monument removed from the Capitol. Crowds of people protesting the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man killed by a Minneapolis police officer in late May, thronged around the monument, demanding its removal.

And on Friday, a man threw red paint on the memorial in protest.

Secretary of State Katie Hobbs in a June 8 letter publicly called on ADOA Director Andy Tobin to move the monument from Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza. She wants Tobin to transfer the monument to the Arizona Capitol Museum, which her office oversees, so she can put it into storage.

But Ducey has no plans to act. He isn’t “a fan of removing monuments or memorials, and certainly not because a letter was written,” he told reporters this month. Instead, he said there should be a public process if the monument is going to be moved, and noted that there was a public process that allowed monuments to be built and placed on state land in the first place. That, he said, is something his administration will have to work on with legislative leadership.

Whatever public process existed for erecting, altering or removing monuments ceased to exist in 2018, when lawmakers and Ducey eliminated the Legislative Governmental Mall Commission. That commission, which the legislature created in 1985, was responsible for reviewing and approving plans for monuments on the Capitol Mall. Legislative approval was required before a proposed monument could go before the commission.

Now, once the legislature has approved a new monument, all authority resides with the Department of Administration, as does all authority over proposed changes. That includes the power to remove a monument from Wesley Bolin Plaza.

Check out what’s being said on Twitter about the defacing of the Arizona statue: