It’s very wise to get out in front of this issue before it becomes a thing. Otherwise, within a matter of months, liberals in media will be treating it like an issue that’s up for debate.

The Washington Examiner reports:

In campus attacks on Thomas Jefferson, Dave Brat sees decline of Judeo-Christian tradition

As an academic from Virginia with a healthy admiration for the Founding Fathers, Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., is in good position to ponder Thomas Jefferson’s imperiled reputation at his state’s flagship university. Jefferson is increasingly controversial at the University of Virginia, a school he founded in 1819, where students have taken to protesting statues of him in recent months.

Asked about disputes over the statues in a Wednesday meeting with the Washington Examiner’s editorial board, Brat said the tributes to Jefferson should remain standing.

“If you’ve educated these kids, and you see that Jefferson opens the mind, and he’s part of the Enlightenment project about emancipating the human spirit and liberating people politically, and is in that historical epoch, on that side of history, moving for human reason to be alive and well— I mean, you gotta view those folks as to the contribution they made, right?” said the second-term Republican. “And he and Madison both wanted it on their tombstone. They didn’t want ‘president’ and all this — [they were] most proud of their statues on religious toleration.”

“If anyone knows anything— which is the problem, no one knows anything anymore about these figures. If you educate people, which would be a radical endeavor for the education folks to engage in any time, then I think the questions would be more sophisticated, and my responses could be more sophisticated,” Brat continued.