So, what happens now?

According to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow, FBI surveillance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the late 1950s and early 1960s (the records of which were just released) produced evidence that Dr. King had dozens of extramarital affairs, participated in sex orgies, hired prostitutes, used the most vulgar language to describe his conduct with women and even laughingly looked on while an associate allegedly raped a woman in a hotel room.

Will the civil rights icon be subject to the same standard that is now being applied to other towering historical figures?

Just last week, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg suggested that the Democratic Party’s annual Jefferson-Jackson dinners should be renamed, since Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and Andrew Jackson was responsible for the forcible relocation of 100,000 Native Americans.

There are calls to remove a painted mural of George Washington in a San Francisco high school named for the first president.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, over 100 Confederate monuments have been removed since 2015 (when mass murderer and white supremacist Dylann Roof shot and killed nine African American worshippers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina). Some of these have been taken down by officials in the dead of night. Others — like “Silent Sam,” a statue of an unnamed Confederate soldier at the University of North Carolina — have been destroyed by a mob.

Universities are scrambling to rename buildings and otherwise redress grievances. The University of Oregon has put in place new criteria that prohibit naming buildings after individuals with “discriminatory, racist, homophobic, or misogynist views.” At the University of Notre Dame, historic painted murals in the campus’ Main Building (popularly known as “the Golden Dome”) are going to be covered up (high-resolution images of the artwork will be posted elsewhere on campus), because the depictions of Christopher Columbus’ interactions with indigenous peoples of the New World have been deemed inaccurate and offensive to Native Americans.

In this era of #MeToo and “Trust Women,” what would the reaction be if a group of feminist activists were to arrange a protest around the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., take sledgehammers and other blunt instruments to the statue of the man there, deface it with spray-painted sayings and hire a crane to knock it over? What would the public reaction be if local police and the National Park Service personnel were ordered to “stand down” and allow that to happen? Would pundits, gender and race scholars, and Hollywood tweeters jump to the protesters’ defense? Would we hear calls for all streets and schools and parks named for Dr. King to be renamed?

I don’t think so. (And I would hope not.) But the deafening silence since the sordid revelations — unverified though some of them are — says plenty about the public discomfort when our heroes are revealed to be deeply flawed individuals. What does it do to their legacy? What standards are we holding public figures to now?