I don't think that's clear.
The Statue of Liberty stands for an ideal. You can't tear down that statue without attacking the ideal (either the ideal itself, or the validity of the country identifying with that ideal).
A statue of Lenin stands for Lenin as an ideologue and authoritarian leader. All hail Comrade Lenin! You intentionally cannot separate the ideal from the person.
A statue of Jesus stands for Jesus as an idea and as symbol of the Christian faith. What would Jesus do? You intentionally cannot separate the ideal from the person, especially since in most doctrine he was literally God on earth.
Even a statue of MLK stands for his personal take on race relations and his contributions to racial equality because (his part of) the movement was very much personified by him.
But it's stupid to use a statue of Jefferson as a personification of the ideals of the United States. I agree that people have tried to, but it's dumb. It's dumb because the point was never to glorify the founders. Goodness! The point was the opposite! The United States was supposed to transcend the goodness or badness of any individual hero. All hail George Washington the Great! Behold our new country, made great by Jeffersonism! No! Explicitly not!
The Federalist Papers were published anonymously in part because the point was the ideas, not the people. (Also, the ideas could, at that point, be dangerous to the people professing them. But that wasn't the only reason.)
As Benjamin Franklin said at the close of the Constitutional Convention, "When you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an Assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies". The point is to transcend the individual.
So if we are to put up a statue of Jefferson and worship life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness at his feet, we're missing the point, badly.
If it takes knocking the statue down to appreciate the difference between hero worship and embrace of wise ideals, knock the statue down.