Ben Stein to Wal-Mart: Hands Off Civil War Battlefield

Ben Stein loves Wal-Mart—just don’t put one smack-dab in the middle of a historic Civil War battlefield in Orange, Va. The 1864 Battle of the Wilderness was a turning point in the conflict, Stein writes in the American Spectator, and the “battlefield is incredibly important environmentally and historically and emotionally. It reeks of the blood of men fighting for causes they considered sacred.”

“I am, as noted, about as devout a fan as there is in the national media. But a store is a store and blood is blood,” Stein writes. “Now may be the time to show that Wal-Mart has a heart as well as a calculator. The blood of those men burned to death, shot through and through, some alive but leaving without their limbs, in what is still America's greatest tragedy, cries out for sanctity.” (More Ben Stein stories.)