I think there's a lot of unwarranted emotion involved here. Ultimately, a women's shelter is a service. If the service is being provided in an old run down building, that isn't good.
There was clearly a compromise here that could have been found. The company pays substantially more than the value of the place without coercion, takes the tax break for charitable giving and gets their precious hotel. In return, the shelter is rebuilt on equally good ground a block away, but with modern premises. I bet if the corporation had come to them first with that offer in good faith, they would have had a different response.
That said, the shelter didn't want to sell. The spitefullness and mean-spiritedness of a corporation that forced a battered women's shelter to give up historically-listed* land in order to build something they don't even need- by exploiting the courts, no less- is unfathomable. No less because it
didn't need to happen.
I don't think the problem is reclaiming symbols so much as bringing the government back to its Constitutional limits,
While this is not the place, I would quite like to know what you consider the government's (governments'?) over-stretching beyond its Constitutional limits. Certainly you've posted what I consider a bunch of myths about alleged 'classical' liberals, who are basically the same as modern ones.
