If you ask me,
this is going too far.
I'm not opposed to changing names and removing statues that
celebrate Confederate leaders. It has struck me as odd, since before the current explosion of national interest in racial justice, that a bunch of streets near my house in a generally quite liberal area are still named for Confederate generals. Statues in downtown parks of Confederate leaders are clearly placed in celebration of those leaders and thus can be reasonably assumed to celebrate the defense of racism and slavery. I'm all for changing those things.
I'm less in favor of removing statuary on Civil War battlesites. I grew up near Gettysburg and visited it a number of times, and I definitely felt that the monuments added something significant to the experience. In addition to providing a symbolic presence of the combatants on the field, they also provided a reminder of how bloody the battle really was - with, to my knowledge, only one exception, equestrian statues at Gettysburg with horses with 4 feet on the ground represent men who survived the battle. Statues with a hoof raised represent men who were wounded. Two hooves represent men who did not make it home. There are many statues with raised hooves. It is worth noting that park officials have claimed repeatedly that this phenomenon was a coincidence and not planned, but it still sparks a great deal of interest. If you remove the equestrian statues of Confederates, you'd need to remove the Union statues as well. It's silly to remember history only through the lens of the side we decide was "right" decades later. I think Gettysburg and other historical sites are better for the statues. But if you want to remove them, it's not a huge deal.
This is something entirely different. The McCown's Longspur wasn't named after Gen. McCown in honor of his service to the Confederacy. It was, like many species, named after the first man to describe it for western science. In essence, what this renaming says is that McCown's service to the Confederacy invalidates anything else he did during his life. The correspondence we have from various Confederate soldiers and leaders indicates that most of them fervently believed they were doing the right thing. Many on these forums have defended the American founders who held slaves or excused slavery to people like coreander as a product of their times and the prevailing beliefs of those times. There is no reason Civil War era figures don't deserve the same consideration. The reality is that most Confederates were doing what they had been raised to believe was morally correct. That doesn't mean we should celebrate what they did. But I do think it means that we should not dismiss their entire lives and all unrelated achievements.