A Single Senator Dashes Hopes for Latino and Women's Museums - For Now - The New York T... - 0 views
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For more than two decades, Latinos and their allies in Congress have been fighting to approve the creation of a National Museum of the American Latino in Washington.
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on Thursday night, as their congressional term dwindles to just days, Republican and Democratic senators gathered on the Senate floor in hopes of capturing overwhelming support to push both over the finish line.
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In the end, the objections of a single senator out of 100, Mike Lee of Utah, were enough to stop both measures and ensure that for now, their proponents will keep waiting.
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when Senators John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, and Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, tried to advance the legislation setting up the Latino museum on the National Mall.
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“My objection to the creation of a new Smithsonian museum or series of museums based on group identity — what Theodore Roosevelt called hyphenated Americanism — is not a matter of budgetary or legislative technicalities,” Mr. Lee said. “It’s a matter of national unity and cultural inclusion.”
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“Surely in a year where we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, this is the time, this is the moment to finally pass the legislation unanimously recommended by an independent commission to establish an American women’s history museum in our nation’s capital,”
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He argued that Latinos were just as entitled to their own cultural institution as African-Americans and Native Americans, to whom Smithsonian museums have been dedicated in recent years.
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That concern, along with budgetary ones, has been one of the main points of opposition to a Latino museum in recent years amid extensive lobbying campaigns in its favor.
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“The so-called critical theory undergirding this movement does not celebrate diversity; it weaponizes diversity,” he said. “It sharpens all those hyphens into so many knives and daggers. It has turned our college campuses into grievance pageants and loose Orwellian mobs to cancel anyone daring to express an original thought.”
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Even if Congress approved the museums, it would likely take about another decade to open their doors.