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.
Absent the rebellion, and had the existing slave states all hung together, then it would have taked 46 states to pass constitutional amendments the slave states opposed. That's a total of 61, if your math is weak. I guess they would still be working at it, huh?
Oh, wait -- they did that, didn't they? Direct election of senators, and then the income tax, and then woman suffrage and Prohibition. Yup, that all worked out well, don't you think?
Take a look at the ratification of those amendments and you'll notice that southern states were early and enthusiastics supporters of the 16th and 18th Amendments, and late out of the gate on the 17th and 21st. Reluctant support of the 18th would be, I imagine, to the southern preference for denying the vote to people.
If Lincoln hadn't started and won the Civil War, we'd probably have had something like 54 instead of 48 States in "the lower 48".
And still not enough to end slavery until Hawaii.
But still an undeniable fact, and something the southern leaders wanted to continue through the addition of ever more slave states.
[You] One man's opinion, until you show otherwise?
You haven't shown yet that "it was all about slavery" since you keep bringing in the docs most favorable to your own thesis, but can't close the deal. And now you demand I document -- as if anyone needed to -- the vast corpus of Northern political propaganda against the South, intended to unify Northern political sentiment against the South.
If the Mississippians refer to slavery, that's a good quote, right? But if they refer just as repeatedly in the same document to Northern hostility and animus, then those references are obviously over-the-top, bogus, and discountable, and I have to "prove" my case by writing a new book. Which you will then sneer at, ignore, and tell me I've been "refuted".
Sorry, Charlie. You must think I'm stupid.
And why shouldn't they? Was there some special frank on their birth certificates, that said "not valid for travel to the Territories"?
You keep assuming a natural moral inferiority of the Southerners of that time, and that it was the right of Northerners to reify that inferiority by the arbitrary exercise of arms. I don't see how you could be any more hostile to a body of citizens of the United States, without being an enemy alien or criminal yourself.
OK, simple question. Answer it and you've gone a long way to proving your point. U.S. tariff income in 1860 was about $60 million, and that the South accounted for upwards of 90% of that, or so Stainelessbanner would have us believe. That would mean that the remaining states accounted for only about $6 million in tariff revenue. In his 1864 message to Congress, Lincoln reported that tariff income for the prior year was $110 million. The question is how could the Northern demand for imports suddenly grow from $6 million in tariffs to $110 million. Can you answer that?
You keep trying to walk this idea past us, that Lincoln would have confined himself to constitutional measures. When clearly that was not his m.o. -- as witness his escapades with West Virginia and Nevada, and his suppression of Maryland and Missouri.
Lincoln was a machine politician who liked the steel fist. He played with the gloves off, and he could have given lessons to all those other machine pols you're so proud of.
"Rape" was the right word.
My best answer, without stopping for a Ph.D. in history.
You might be better with a couple of entry level courses in the dismal science. Any economist will tell you that a tariff like the Morrill tariff is protectionist and is not designed to enhance revenue. Instead, it should discourage imports by making domestic products more cost effective. Revenue should remain about the same or go down because of it, not increase by a factor of 20. And economic boom or not, the only reason why imports should have gone through the roof is if the Northern states had had to replace products that they no longer got from the south. What might those have been, do you think?
What was unconstitutional about all that?
Lincoln was a machine politician who liked the steel fist. He played with the gloves off, and he could have given lessons to all those other machine pols you're so proud of.
(*yawn*) One man's opinion, until you show otherwise.
I've provided quite a few quotes from the leaders of the time that it was, and you've provided only your opinion on Lincoln. Surely you can do better than that?
But if they refer just as repeatedly in the same document to Northern hostility and animus, then those references are obviously over-the-top, bogus, and discountable, and I have to "prove" my case by writing a new book. Which you will then sneer at, ignore, and tell me I've been "refuted".
Not when all that alleged "hostility and animus" are directed at the institution of slavery.
Sorry, Charlie. You must think I'm stupid.
Not yet but I am getting close.
But it did, didn't it? Ever hear of the Billion-Dollar Congress?
Or hadn't needed -- like war materiel.
What might those have been, do you think?
You have something in mind? Spit it out.
But generating 20 times as much revenue within 4 years? How is that possible? What made up the sudden massive increase in import demands in the North?
Oh, do you're saying that the government levied a tax on itself by placing a tariff on war materials? I've read the original Morrill Tariff bill and I must have missed that part. How high was the tariff of cannons, rifles, gunpowder, and the like?
You have something in mind? Spit it out.
Sure. I think that is further evidence that rather than providing the bulk of tariff revenue, the southern states actually imported very little and probably provided a disproportionately small percentage of total federal receipts, and that claims that the southern rebellion was primarily about tariffs is a smokescreen put up by those who can't admit that it was primarily about slavery. How's that?
posting STUPID pictures/cartoons is ALL you accomplish on the forum, other than embarrassing the "unionists" here.
be GONE to DU!
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
About what I expected from you -- rope-a-dope and homework assignments. I'd be your dope to debate on your terms -- and I won't.
You know what he did, we discussed the unconstitutional admissions of both Nevada (insufficient population) and West Virginia (part of an existing State, no consent of same to partition) to death, and we went 15 rounds each on his suppression of the People in Missouri and Maryland -- and their governments in both States, using a cabal of Wide Awakes in Missouri and the Army in Maryland to impose direct military rule in both.
(*yawn*) One man's opinion, until you show otherwise.
Slothful induction, bad faith in discourse. Already demonstrated in abundance by nolu chan's documentation of Lincoln's interference with the Judiciary Branch and suppression of civil rights in arresting citizens, legislators, newspapermen, Rep. Vallandigham, and his issue of a warrant for Chief Justice Taney.
Mark Neely can run out his "so's your old man, and you're another" recriminatory jibes about Jeff Davis until the cows come home, but the fact remains, that Lincoln did all these things out of his determination to conquer the South. He didn't have to open hostilities by ignoring the People and pretending to govern by force the People of another country, in pursuit of an irridentist policy of forcible reunion. As the term of art would have it now, the Civil War was, for him, a discretionary war -- an option. He voluntarily advanced these policies and methods, as part of his larger policy.
As I said -- these weren't just "emergency measures", they were his answer to the problem posed by constitutional slavery in the South and the rights of the Southerners and their States, the problem he had confessed in his letters of 1855 that he didn't yet know how to solve. These methods were his response to the problem as he saw it, his modus operandi -- just as I said.
His determination to conquer being that great, he both ruled and conquered with the same iron glove -- the Army, which was unleashed on dissent in the North as well as on the Southern States.
Or do I have to document the fact that Lincoln used the Army?!
He's going to tell us how bad Indiana sucks in a minute, though.
Specially when I tell him I come from there. That'll finally clarify for him why he can't stand me -- I'm more Republican than he is, and I come from Indiana.
Besides the point of my post was to shut down kangaroo, who said the CSA was larger and should have lasted longer. Any of those numbers show otherwise. Y'all live in a fantasy world and that last statement just proves there is a real lack of historical basis from alot of folks on these threads.
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