The state that invented “Virginia is for Lovers” has decided it is no longer in love with paying for your favorite insurrection

There is something uniquely, magnificently, almost acrobatically American about a government financially underwriting an organization whose entire purpose is the loving maintenance of a rebellion against that same government.

It has the gymnastic elegance of a man hiring a skywriter to commemorate the time he burned his own house down — the nostalgia-industrial complex in full, flag-draped, tax-exempt flower.

For decades, Virginia — once the Confederacy’s capital, now the capital of belated self-awareness — extended tax exemptions to groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in 1894 with the serene audacity of people who lost a war and decided the solution was better marketing.