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I agreed 100% with your post. I was born in Virginia (Norfolk, a real Navy Baby) and even though I had lived mostly in Virginia and Maryland when we weren't on Navy bases somewhere, I had to consider myself a northerner after I moved up here to New England when my Dad retired when I was 16.

It was when I went into the Navy myself, that I found out the Civil War was still going on in the hearts and minds of some people...:)

But that said, I agree with your assessment of Robert E. Lee, as I believe everyone should. He was not only a great general, but a real human being, worthy of respect regardless of where you or your ancestors lived.

I don't feel quite the same way about the Confederate Flag, but in my case, I think it is more a childish attempt to poke my finger in the eye of people who advocate political correctness, rather than a real desire to keep it flying. I have found lately that I am susceptible to this behavior, in which it is more important to me to piss people off by saying something politically incorrect just because it is so, not because I have any affinity or affiliation with it. I need to be more careful about that. I can be non-politically correct without throwing gasoline on a fire simply to make a bigger fire for the sole purpose of annoying someone.

Funny, I always thought that quote was from Stonewall Jackson, so I had to look it up (if one can trust Wikipedia for this) and he did say something similar to Lee: "I like liquor — its taste and its effects — and that is just the reason why I never drink it." As quoted in Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of Gen. Robert E. Lee (1874) by John William Jones, p. 171

I would have to guess that must have been a common sentiment amongst many men of strong character of that day...when one looks at the statistics of how much alcohol our forefathers drank in those days, because nobody drank water if they could avoid it, because it was often unclean...so they drank a LOT of alcohol.

To be totally transparent (albeit lengthy) regarding the Confederate Battle flag and my change of heart on it, every year -- including this -- I've hoisted it on the flagpole at my house on the Martin Luther King holiday. It was my way of protesting. Until just a few months ago, my Texas license plates (front and rear) had a cutout of that flag.

My rather sudden transformation dates back to several months before the Charleston church shooting and the South Carolina flag controversy. At my very Conservative church of Christ congregation, we had a new assistant preacher come in. He's also the teacher in my adult Sunday school class. He's a thoroughly solid Christian with two young girls, a loving wife, a native of Port Arthur who did his post-grad work at Texas A&M. And he's black but if you didn't see his skin, you wouldn't know it since he speaks with a deep East Texas accent.

One morning he was outside the church building as I drove up for Sunday school. As I walked in, I asked him if the Confederate flag around the license plate caught his eye and if it bothered him. He said absolutely not and we let it go at that. After services, I saw him in the church kitchen and we sat down for a cup or two of coffee for a chat to talk more about the flag (remember this was before the South Carolina incidents). He again emphasized that the flag didn't bother him and so I recounted how I flew it every year on MLK day. What he then said took me by surprise. He said if you really want to draw attention to what King was about, fly the hammer and sickle! In no uncertain terms, he told me that he considered MLK to be a communist and one of the worst things to happen to America, setting back the progress that had been made in race relations until his radical approach created so much animosity between whites and blacks.

That, of course, caught my attention and we continued our conversation about race, politics and the flags. As an Aggie who was attending in 1999 when the bonfire disaster happened, he asked if it would have helped the healing process if a UT student had planted the Longhorn flag atop the remains of the bonfire? Had that been done, it would have not merely part of the longtime rivalry but would have made enemies. (In reality, the Longhorns handled the situation well with their band actually playing the "Aggie War Hymn" when they met on the football field).

What he next said is what finally led to my change of heart. As we walked from the kitchen area, we headed toward the church auditorium on our way out to the parking lot. There were (and are) three flags on the podium, similar to this picture:

He then asked if adding the Confederate battle flag to those three would serve to further Glorify God? And then he quoted I Corinthians 10:23: All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but all things edify not.

I was born in Virginia (Norfolk, a real Navy Baby) and even though I had lived mostly in Virginia and Maryland when we weren't on Navy bases somewhere, I had to consider myself a northerner after I moved up here to New England when my Dad retired when I was 16.

I talked your ear off in another post about the Confederate battle flag and my recent re-thinking of it leading to a change of my former attitude.

This more succinct reply is just to tell you that the maternal side of my family is from Tidewater and traces back their roots for generations there. Although my mom was a native Texan, all of her forebears were Virginians. Most were from the Peninsula (Newport News, Hampton and Yorktown) but we some rogue elements from Norfolk! :)

My grandpappy was a great man and I can still remember how he spoke with that Tidewater dialect: roof, house and about. For a man born in the 19th Century, he was reasonably tolerant of blacks (or "nigras" as he called them). The one group of people he couldn't stand, though, were North Carolinaians or "border hoppers" as he referred to them. He was very protective of Virginia and its heritage and resented the influx of people from Carolina working at the shipyards and such. Truth be told, that was the only prejudice he really had.