Last week, House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels (D-Huntsville) proposed to strip state monies from the Confederate Memorial Park near Marbury in Chilton County, calling the funding “not appropriate” and the park “something that brings a lot of pain back to Alabamians.”

Daniels has received pushback from some Republican lawmakers, including State Sen. Tom Butler (R-Madison), who cited the roughly 300 Confederate veterans buried at the park as justification for the state to continue funding. Add State Rep. Will Dismukes (R-Prattville) to the list as well, who called Daniels’ push “dead wrong.”

During an interview with Huntsville radio WVNN’s “The Jeff Poor Show” on Wednesday, Dismukes, who represents a district just south of the park, explained the park serves multiple purposes beyond memorializing the Confederacy.

“I think he’s dead wrong,” Dismukes said of Daniels’ proposition. “I don’t think it would be a wise decision for our state to move in that directions. With a couple of the monuments that have come down, we’re actively trying to get them where we can hopefully get them to the [Confederate] Memorial Park, where they won’t at least collect dust or disappear in a city warehouse. If you turnaround and defund Memorial Park, then all of a sudden for the cities that are taking down monuments — if they don’t have a place in their city for them to go, what’s going to happen to them? You know, it’s going to be history put off in a corner somewhere that has a good story to tell — even if the good story was tough times and not pleasant to understand.”

Dismukes pointed out the park also plays an educational role to give visitors an idea of what life was like during the Civil War from a soldier’s perspective.

“There are two barracks there that were built exactly to Army Corps specs,” he said. “The exact way that barracks were built for both the South and the North. They still have live reenactments there. They have living history days for school children from all across the state come out there.”

“They actually give you and day-in, day-out look at what a soldier would have had to do without the modern conveniences that we enjoy today,” Dismukes added. “All of that would be lost as well because there’s no way to keep up [without] the funding.”

@Jeff_Poor is a graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Alabama, the editor of Breitbart TV, a columnist for Mobile’s Lagniappe Weekly and host of Huntsville’s “The Jeff Poor Show” from 2-5 p.m. on WVNN.