Posted on 07/18/2006 12:49:14 PM PDT by aomagrat
A Confederate heritage group says its free-speech rights were violated when a landowner removed a billboard promoting Southern history near the famed Darlington Raceway.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans plans to demonstrate at the State House next month and buy radio advertisements to complain about losing its billboard on U.S. 52, about two miles from the racetrack.
“This is the most chilling thing I’ve seen against freedom of speech,” spokesman Don Gordon said.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans bought the billboard this spring in response to remarks by a NASCAR executive about the rebel flag.
The billboard featured a Confederate flag and a checkered race flag. The message said, “Victory is Great, but Honor is Greater. Defend your Southern heritage.”
The billboard, taken down briefly in May, also listed the group’s phone number and name.
Officials of the S.C. Central Railroad, which owns the land where the billboard stood, said the message was “controversial” and needed to come down.
“It is not in our commercial interests to have billboards on our property displaying messages that might be controversial in the local community, whatever the substance of the messages,” a company spokeswoman said in a prepared statement.
“We made no judgment as to the content of the billboard, but we did understand it to be controversial and therefore asked that it be removed.”
An outdoor advertising company, hired by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, installed the sign just before Darlington’s annual Mother’s Day race. It was removed permanently June 16, according to a July 11 letter from the S.C. Sons of Confederate Veterans commander, Randall Burbage, to fellow members.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans says it is an international, nonprofit historical society. The group, which says it has 30,000 members nationally, has taken positions in defense of the Confederate flag in South Carolina.
‘NOT ... ANYTHING FAVORABLE’
In October, NASCAR’s chief executive, Brian France, told the CBS television show “60 Minutes” the Confederate flag was “not a flag that I look at with anything favorable. That’s for sure.”
As it branches away from its traditional Southern fan base, NASCAR has tried to shed its rebel-flag-waving image. The nation’s largest stock car racing organization has started diversity programs and tried to appeal to black and Hispanic fans. The Darlington Raceway, in business for more than 50 years, has served as a pillar of NASCAR.
“A member of the France family said some uncomplimentary things, so we put that billboard up to make a statement and to stimulate new members,” the confederate veterans’ Gordon said. “We really didn’t expect anything like this to occur.”
Attempts to reach NASCAR spokesman Jim Hunter were unsuccessful. However, Hunter said last spring that NASCAR did not seek to have the sign removed.
“If we find out NASCAR is involved, you can expect airplanes towing Confederate banners over every NASCAR race anywhere in this nation — forever,” Gordon said.
Mac Josey, vice president at the Darlington Raceway, said he knew nothing about the billboard and did not ask that it be removed. He said the track does not fly Confederate flags, although some fans do.
Wesley Blackwell, chairman of the Darlington County Council, said he heard about the billboard during a social gathering at the Darlington speedway in May. Blackwell said the county did not ask that the sign be removed.
‘NOT A WORD WOULD BE SAID’
The Confederate veterans group paid Palmetto Outdoor Media more than $5,000 to put up the advertisement, Gordon said. Most of the money was refunded when the sign was removed.
However, Gordon is not satisfied.
“What if it was a sign trying to bring new members to the NAACP? We all know not a word would be said,” Gordon said.
Palmetto Outdoor Media co-owner Rodney Monroe said his company’s land-lease agreement with S.C. Central Railroad has a section that called for the removal of offensive advertisements.
“We lease the property from the company and we, obviously, crossed the line as far as what was acceptable to them ... and were asked to remove the sign,” Monroe said. “We are not in the business to cause or create controversy.”
Gordon said his group had a contract with Palmetto Outdoor for the sign to stay up through part of next year.
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees every American the right to free speech. However, the sign was on private property, and the property’s owner ordered it down.
Bill Rogers, director of the S.C. Press Association, said that removal violated the principle of free speech, if nothing else. The sign did not appear to be inflammatory, he said.
“I can see why they would feel their rights are violated, that if someone doesn’t like the message, they take it down,” Rogers said.
As senators and governors the damage that they can do is limited. But president? We'll be paying for the damage Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Bush, all the southern presidents have done.
PLEASE continue posting your IGNORANT, hate-FILLED nonsense & bilge. (you, too serve the Risen Southland, though you are too DIMwitted to understand that.)
free dixie,sw
the thought of "HITLERry rodham klintoon" as either senator, or worse yet as POTUS, is FRIGHT inspiring.
she has the instincts/inclinations of a TRUE fascist & is POTENTIALLY the most dangerous person in the USA!
free dixie,sw
Bill Clinton. Jimmy Carter. Lyndon Johnson. Southerners all. Disasters as presidents. Deal with it
free dixie,sw
I always love this one. It doesn't show up often, but it's always good when it does.
Unfortunately, it was on private property and the owner made the decision, not the government. So, much as I disagree with it, case closed.
Yakkity-yak the smickety-smack. Only because you don't have the facts.
How long did you have to work to come up with that?
I've got the guy you responded to on bozo filter anyway. Just ignore him. Plonk and ignore.
Salon's "TableTalk" was a forum teeming with loathsome West Coast PC troglodytes, but at least they had a bozo filter that worked -- you literally didn't have to look at the poster's stuff if you didn't want to. Just invoke the filter, and the guy's stuff was blipped and replaced with placeholders.
In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world. --Mississppi Declaration of the Causes of Secession
Incomplete quote, and selective. The slavery issue was indeed prominent in Mississippi's thinking -- cotton was the state's entire livelihood -- but your selective quote provides no context and no idea of the Mississippians' degree of apprehension of the full consequences of uncompensated emancipation and (as they feared) imposition of black political equality, which would necessarily turn Mississippi into a balkanized and bitterly divided society, as well as an impoverished one, overnight. Which Reconstruction did, in fact, accomplish. As the declaration points out, in the sections you omitted, such a political scheme could only have been the product of the deepest malevolence. Here is the full declaration:
A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union In the momentous step, which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.
The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.
The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France.
The same hostility dismembered Texas and seized upon all the territory acquired from Mexico.
It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.
It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.
It tramples the original equality of the South under foot.
It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact, which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.
It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.
It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.
It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.
It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better.
It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives.
It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security.
It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system.
It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.
It has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood.
Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.
Our decision is made. We follow their footsteps. We embrace the alternative of separation; and for the reasons here stated, we resolve to maintain our rights with the full consciousness of the justice of our course, and the undoubting belief of our ability to maintain it.
While the Mississippi declaration gives prominence to the slavery issue, other declarations gave other causes and reasons as well, and your quotation from Mississippi's declaration is therefore selective in the first place, so that your selective quotation from it is doubly selective. Which is what your side does all the time. Then you complain when Southerners try to supply the balance and bring in the missing material, and you pretend that they are trying to mislead, and most importantly, to exculpate their ancestors from your bitterly accusatory, Marxist-inspired "deconstructionist" finger-pointing.
The eleventh through 17th paragraphs list a litany of political complaints and apprehensions that describe, even if there were no slavery issue at all, a situation of the most extreme bitterness among the compacted States, and the summary paragraph that begins, "Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it," describes the political conclusions the leading Mississippians drew from their generations-long confrontation with New England's reflexively directive, bullying attitude toward other regions of the country.
The issue here is clearly the Mississippians' apprehension of the impending total loss of their ability to govern themselves in a Union run by a Lincolnite political machine, on a basis of rigorous exclusion of the South and its interests from federal policymaking. The transformation, moreover, of federal into national policymaking is another issue less emphasized but clearly apprehended, in the references to "subjugation" and "degrad[ation]", by the Mississippians.
And this is in a document that, as I pointed out above, places more emphasis on the slavery institution than some of the other States' declarations.
Careful. Remember, you're supposed to be wearing a blue uniform, not a black one.
By the way -- you post just like several other people who don't have posting privileges anymore. You wouldn't be a retread, would you? Just wondering.
And the reason that so many of them aren't here anymore, is that they posted the way you just did. It eventually bit 'em.
And what region do you come from, whose politicians sparkle like diamonds with unending brilliance and pure white fire?
I noticed that you don't post a locality on your non-home-page.
You from the U.N.?
LOL, yeah, do that. Hand me your head in shame. LOL.
Marxist-inspired? Give me a break.
The eleventh through 17th paragraphs list a litany of political complaints and apprehensions that describe, even if there were no slavery issue at all, a situation of the most extreme bitterness among the compacted States, and the summary paragraph that begins, "Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it,"...
Let's see. Eleven through fourteen complain about abolitionists. Absent slavery I don't see what they would complain about. Fifteen is, I assume, a reference to John Brown. Absent slavery Brown wouldn't have left Osawatomie. Sixteen and seventeen I have no idea what they are talking about. and in eighteen they complain about a Constitutionally valid election and the new administrations hostility to, tada, slavery. So even when you're trying to say that the southern rebellion wasn't about slavery, it was still about slavery.
And this is in a document that, as I pointed out above, places more emphasis on the slavery institution than some of the other States' declarations.
Because defense of slavery was the overriding reason for the southern rebellion.
So here's the deal. Read close.
These declarations have been previously discussed, the tariffs and economic issues have been discussed by hardworking people on this forum -- Pea Ridge, 4CJ, rustbucket, GOPcapitalist, nolu chan, and many other posters have brought in material, as have I.
If, having seen all that, and knowing that we all know that you have seen all that material and ignored it, you think for one femtosecond that I am going to respect your otiose, bad-faith, makework, patronizing little demand for "proof", then you are out of your mind.
The material's been put up. It's out there. Go fetch, yourself.
Deal with that.
See how slow these threads get when I ignore them?
The truth about these new dixie wannabees is that they are no different then the Reparations for slaves crowd. They want something for a time when they weren't borne into, and respect that they haven't earned for something they didn't do.
Discussed and refuted. But here you are again.
If, having seen all that, and knowing that we all know that you have seen all that material and ignored it, you think for one femtosecond that I am going to respect your otiose, bad-faith, makework, patronizing little demand for "proof", then you are out of your mind.
You forgot to call us 'Marxists' this time. Would you like to try again?
Illinois. You know, Land of Lincoln, birthplace of Ronald Reagan. I currently live in Kansas. Find a more Republican state than that.
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