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Done and done. My point was that too many imbeciles on the left are making the Southern Cross the scapegoat for the troglodytic attitudes of Nazis, Klansmen and skinheads. These dim bulbs forget that the average Reb soldier didn't fight to preserve slavery, nor did the average Blue belly fight to end it. My great-great grandfather thought the Union states were doing to the South what Britain was doing to Ireland....trying to subjugate it. The typical Union soldier was of the opinion that Southern plantation society was akin to the aristocracy of Europe.

Granted, those are pretty broad strokes, as some Rebs were fighting to maintain the "peculiar institution," and some Federals were abolitionists, but those were the minority. Basically, slavery was A cause of the War, not THE cause, as the dimwit revisionists would have us believe. The fight for national level political supremacy between sections, hypocrisy on both sides, changing economic conditions, and societal shifts brought on by increased immigration were the main causes of the shooting....slavery was just caught up in all of that. I could make the argument that the southern states were entirely justified in wanting to see slavery expanded into the western territories, and equally that they were being hypocritical in claiming "States's rights" and then wanting to deny those rights to people in states who didn't want slavery by saying that if it's legal one place, it must be legal everywhere. As well, the north was just as hypocritical in calling secession wrong, and calling secession "treason", when Massachusetts was prepared to leave the Union over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and none in the north considered that treasonous.

My heartfelt belief is that the men who fought that war were ALL the best Americans, as they did what Americans have always done: Fought for freedom. In one case, it was the freedom to be left alone to live your life as you'd always lived it, in the other it was a fight to determine if freedom applied to all of us or just to some of us. You can take your pick as to which side is which....because some Rebs fought for one and not the other, and some Federals fought for the other and not for one.

I may have reenacted the War in a blue uniform, but I revere the Southern Cross as a symbol of bravery and honor, just the same as I do the Stars and Stripes. Banning the Southern Cross is just shy of banning the Stars and Stripes, and I won't stand for either to happen.