So how about we admire those special people as heroes, rather than idolizing people who internalized the poor morals of their time? I never said that someone who is against slavery today deserves any moral credit.

I also never said that "heroes" have to be absolutely perfect to deserve admiration. I see it as a spectrum from morality to immorality, not as a binary between either "hero" or "trash." And I think that on that spectrum, the five men I criticized in the article fall somewhere between the middle and the immoral end. For each of them, there were contemporary figures who were more remarkable and more courageous in combating the moral ills of the time.

Regarding your other point, I didn't use "all or nothing" judgement in my article--you seem to be projecting that. I simply said that these men are not "great," I didn't say that they are complete shit or even that they should be "canceled."

And just because John Brown was homophobic, doesn't mean that literally everyone else was at the time. How can you have the hubris to claim that literally everyone was homophobic without even providing any evidence? You really think that every gay or bisexual person who lived at the time was homophobic? Every atheist and Buddhist? I'd like to see proof. That's incredibly presumptuous to assume that. And even if you were right that literally everyone in the US in the 1800s was homophobic, how can we assume that about every other culture on the planet? The US has a homophobia problem, not all of humanity. It's not surprising to me that a country as racist and homophobic as ours wouldn't produce many moral heroes. At least not who are straight and white.