Like the Southern gentlemen whose likenesses they bear, at least one of Louisiana’s three remaining Confederate monuments isn’t going down without a fight.

A resident sued the City of New Orleans Monday over the planned removal of a statue of Confederate General Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard. A judge refused to issue the restraining order later that day.

“It’s a form of cultural cleansing that will not stop at Confederate memorials.”

New Orleans resident Richard Marksbury was seeking a temporary restraining order against the city in order to prevent it from “touching, removing or doing anything with the Beauregard monument,” he told reporters on Monday.

According to the lawsuit, the statue, which guards the entrance to City Park, is actually on private land, hence the mayor and the city have no legal authority to remove it.

“We now have some documents that I believe will make a difference and show that City Park, as an incorporated association under the lieutenant governor’s office, owns the land that the monument is on, and owns the monument,” Marksbury said.

The legal situation surrounding ownership of the Beauregard monument has even caught the eye of Louisiana’s lieutenant governor, Billy Nungesser.

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“It has come to my attention that one of the monuments that Mayor Mitch Landrieu is planning to remove is owned by the New Orleans City Park Improvement Association (“CPIA”),” Nungesser wrote to the CPIA Board of Commissioners.

Nungesser is the commissioner of tourism for the state and is opposed to the removal of the New Orleans monuments.

“I am troubled that the CPIA Board of Commissioners has apparently been aware of this ownership interest for some time now, yet has not exercised its fiduciary duty to protect this valuable state asset,” wrote Nungesser, who also urged the board to “immediately notify the mayor in writing of your objection to his removal and seizure of the Beauregard monument.”

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But despite the legal basis for staying the statue’s removal, Civil Court Judge Kern Reese refused to grant an injunction. New Orleans’ efforts to erase visible reminders of Louisiana’s Confederate past began in April, at the recommendation of a city committee established to review the monuments.

The decision is part of a wider war against the country’s Confederate history, which began in the wake of the Charleston church shooting, when photographs surfaced online showing the perpetrator, Dylann Roof, holding a Confederate flag.

Following the shooting, South Carolina removed the Confederate flag from state property. In August 2016, Vanderbilt University removed the word “Confederate” from its Confederate Memorial Hall. In September 2016, the Alexandria, Virginia, city council passed a resolution calling for the removal of the town’s monument to Confederate veterans. In February, the City of Charlottesville, Virginia, voted to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee and rename the city’s Lee Park.

Some say the effort to remove Confederate monuments is pure partisanship — an effort to erase reminders of the Democratic Party’s racist past.

“There’s no existing narrative of the Civil War where the Democrat Party comes out looking good,” Eddie Zipperer, assistant professor of political science at Georgia Military College, told LifeZette.

“Memories of the Civil War make it very difficult for Democrats to rewrite history in a way that allows them to appropriate the Republican Party’s historical greatness,” Zipperer said. “The Democrats simply wish to erase the biggest mistake their party ever made.”

Others, however, say the effort to remove Confederate monuments transcends mere party politics and raises far more important ideological questions.

“The removal of all things Confederate is complicated,” said Dr. Marshall De Rosa, a political science professor at Florida Atlantic University and expert on the Civil War.

“Some support stems from sheer ignorance about what those monuments represent,” said De Rosa, referring to those who see Confederate monuments as inherently racist. Others, however, are apparently motivated by far more sinister, ideological motives, he said.

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“It’s a form of cultural cleansing that will not stop at Confederate memorials,” De Rosa warned. “There are discussions to tear down the Jefferson Memorial, rename Washington, D.C., change the U.S. flag, etc.,” De Rosa noted.

“The purpose is to make Americans, specifically white Christian Americans, ashamed of their ancestors, if not themselves,” De Rosa told LifeZette. “This makes them much more vulnerable to manipulation by and capitulation to the policy demands of the Left and their globalist supporters.”