Posted on 08/07/2005 1:46:19 PM PDT by SmithL
Lawyer Kirk D. Lyons got married 15 years ago in a traditional Scottish ceremony, wearing a kilt as he walked down the aisle to the strains of bagpipes.
Like most traditional weddings, the ceremony was held at the bride's church and paid for by her family.
But this church, the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, was located in the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho, where the father of the bride was second-in-command of the white supremacist group to Richard Butler, who officiated. A former leader of the Texas Ku Klux Klan stood as best man.
Those nuptials, along with Lyons' predilection for defending white supremacists early in his career, his sometimes-inflammatory rhetoric, and his unapologetic scorn for the mainstream civil-rights movement, have made him a lightning rod for the cases he handles as the lead counsel for the Southern Legal Resources Center.
His detractors call him a racist.
He says he's just a lawyer giving clients their constitutional right to counsel.
And if the Maryville Board of Education gives final approval to a ban on flags at school events - effectively barring the Rebel flag from ball games - and Confederate flag supporters file a lawsuit, Lyons likely will bring his polarizing personality to Blount County.
"I'm a controversial figure," Lyons said in a telephone interview last week. "If you defend the Confederate flag, you'd better get used to unfairly being labeled a racist."
Lyons said he plans to meet with Maryville residents today to plan strategy for the aftermath of the school board's vote. Gary Young, leader of a group of Maryville High School supporters who want to keep the right to wave the Confederate battle flag at Rebel games, said no decisions will be made until the school board vote.
"We are going to meet with them and discuss at length various options," Young said.
Based in Black Mountain, N.C., the Southern Legal Resources Center litigates cases involving the Rebel flag and other symbols of the Confederacy.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights organization based in Montgomery, Ala., doesn't include the Southern Legal Resource Center among the hate groups it monitors.
However, Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, said a group Lyons ran until 1998, Canada, Australia, the United States, South Africa and Europe, or CAUSE, was a racist organization.
Potok and others at the SPLC have written extensively about Lyons in the center for Intelligence Report, a publication for the Intelligence Project. Though Lyons said his only connection with white supremacist organizations is representing them in court, Potok isn't convinced.
"I think it's completely false that Lyons has somehow had a conversion," Potok said. "He doesn't just represent white supremacists, he is a white supremacist."
Lyons disputes the appellation. He says he's done nothing wrong and that "anybody who says otherwise can go to hell."
He says he's defended more minority clients than Klansmen.
"They don't want you to hear that," he said. "They want you to hear about the sheets and the hoods."
According to published accounts, including The Associated Press, The Independent Weekly, the Asheville Citizen-Times and the Intelligence Report, Lyons' career has traveled from controversy to controversy.
Lyons grew up mostly in Texas and got his law degree from the University of Houston. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, his first foray with radical groups was his successful defense of former Klansman Louis Beam, who in the late 1980s was acquitted of charges of conspiracy to overthrow the federal government.
Beam would later stand as Lyons' best man.
Lyons takes offense that people attack him through his family, a group that includes father-in-law Charles Tate, once second-in-command of the Aryan Nations, and brother-in-law David Tate, a member of The Order who is serving a life sentence in Missouri for killing a state trooper.
"What you're saying is, I married the moonshiner's daughter," Lyons said. "But that doesn't make me a moonshiner."
Lyons has defended members of the Posse Comitatus, the Klan and the Aryan Nations. He says he would only represent people he was convinced were innocent and is proud of his work. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Lyons has spoken at an Aryan Nations World Congress and marched with Klansmen in Tennessee.
He showed up on the legal fringe of such high-profile incidents as Ruby Ridge, Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing. In 1996, Lyons helped mediate a peaceful end to an 81-day standoff between the FBI and the Montana Freemen.
That same year, he turned his attention from representing radicals to defending the Confederate flag by co-founding the Southern Legal Resources Center.
Roger McCredie, the center's executive director, said Lyons' notoriety doesn't detract from the organization's efforts.
"He's a very fine constitutional lawyer," McCredie said. "I think anybody with two grains of sense can take this other stuff with two grains of salt."
Lyons lost a Texas case nearly identical to the Maryville situation and claims victory in a Kentucky case over a school dress code that eventually was settled out of court. He's representing a girl in Kentucky who was barred from her prom for wearing a dress using the Confederate battle flag design. He has argued - unsuccessfully - that the federal government should bestow national origin status to people born in the old Confederacy.
An associate is H.K. Edgerton, a black man and former NAACP leader in Asheville who drew press attention last month by walking to Maryville toting a Confederate flag to show his opposition to the proposed ban.
Edgerton caused a stir several years ago by mugging for a camera with Lyons and another man, who all wore on their heads white napkins fashioned as hoods. Edgerton was kicked out of the NAACP and now serves on the Southern Legal Resource Center's advisory board.
Lyons also is at the forefront of a group that has taken over the leadership of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and steered the organization into a more activist role. The new leadership has caused dissention in the ranks of the SCV, prompting some to leave the heritage organization to form splinter groups.
"A lot of SCV members understand that the biggest obstacle we face is the association of Confederate symbols with racists and anti-Semites," said Robert Murphree, a Jackson, Miss., lawyer and SCV officer.
"There is a significant number of people in the Sons of Confederate Veterans who have no use for Mr. Lyons, his organization and his associates," Murphree said.
Lyons dismissed such attacks as the grumbling of an arrogant, elitist minority.
"The reform of the SCV has been a long time coming," he said. "I always saw the SCV as the best vehicle for defending Southern heritage. ... We need to use all the weapons in our arsenal - legal, political, social."
Some detractors say Lyons' embrace of mainstream organizations like the SCV is his way of drawing a mantle of respectability around himself.
Monroe Gilmour, coordinator for Asheville-based Western North Carolina Citizens for an End to Institutional Bigotry, said Lyons appears to be following the advice he gave in a 1992 interview with the German nationalist magazine Volkstreue.
In that interview, Lyons said the Klan should hang up its robes and go underground. He said the Klan is full of "spies" and that "most of its best leaders have left the Klan to do more effective work within the movement."
He also told the magazine that "Democracy is a farce and a failure," according to a translation distributed by Gilmour.
"He has always tried to dance around his past associations," Gilmour said. "We say, 'Renounce what they stand for.'"
Lyons called the translation "hideous," adding that his aim was to prevent Germans from embracing a failed organization.
"I don't like the Klan," Lyons said last week. "I've never liked the Klan. Only stupid people join it.
"I didn't do anything I needed to denounce," he added.
The Southern Legal Resource Center came to Maryville the last time the flag controversy flared, when the school board in 1999 voted to remove the emblem from official school materials. Nothing came of the group's offer of legal assistance then.
As the leader of the Maryville group fighting the school board this time around, Young said he merely wants to continue a long-standing school tradition and doesn't want to broaden the debate to social issues.
"We are unquestionably going to fight for the Rebel flag as it pertains to Maryville High School," he said. "There's absolutely nothing racist about it."
If you wave the Bonnie Blue, chances are no one notices.
Let's see, the Confederacy had the Battle flag for four years. The racists have had the battle flag for over a hundred. If you wave a battle flag in someone's face, prepare to have problems.
How about if you use the word "niggardly" in a sentence? That's not racist, but a whole lot of idiots sure think it is. Does that make it so?
(kirk lyons) strassmeir okc
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You will see why I stuck to physics -- and refused to address "Whodunnit?" or "Why?" -- in the OKBIC Final Report...
Lyons ping...
The Southern Poverty Law Center is just another radical lefty organization. See more at http://www.discoverthenetwork.com/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6989
I am so glad to see how understanding you are of history and human struggle. Your kindness and acceptance washes over me and overcomes me.
I was prepared to dislike it, but to my surprise, it is pretty good.
The snippets with Shelby Foote are just awesome. Got me to the Library to check out his Narrative Vol One - which I had read partly some time ago.
An unexpected find was a book of his correspondence with Walker Percy.
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