Posted on 12/20/2001 4:02:40 PM PST by t-shirt
Court Backs Confederate Banner Ban At Cemetery U.S. Judge's Ruling Reversed on Appeal By Brooke A. Masters Washington Post
Thursday, December 20, 2001
The Department of Veterans Affairs can ban the daily display of the Confederate battle flag at a Maryland cemetery where more than 3,000 Southern prisoners are buried, a federal appeals court has ruled, reversing a lower court decision that said the ban violated the First Amendment....
See Entire Washington Post Story by clicking here
Can you imagine this in America?
We have a cemetary where over 3,000 Confederate were buried and a Confederalte flag cannot be displayed?
Atleast the original court clearly saw this as a violation of the first Amendment.
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Look at this quote "to preserve these cemeteries as quiet places in which to honor the American dead, free from controversy and partisan conflict."
When in the hell did some imaginary need for keeping quite places free from controversity and conflict override the Bill of Rights of our Constitution?
If Protesters want to protest a flag being peacefully and quitely flown at a cemetary and interupt a ceremony then let them be arrested if the authority have a law against such, but why take away free speech for peacefully showing a flag in honor of the cayse which men believed in and bravely died for(Whether you agree with their cause or not)?
dig up those traitors who took up arms against the UNION!!
Yeah, look what Lincoln started.
---max
so taliban / alqaeda material will be at john walker's grave -- unmolested? i doubt it.
Where can I buy a Confederate flag? I'm ready to fight.
Traitors??? Please...the states had a right to secede from the Union. Debatable for sure, but not for you. I'll give you Horace Greeley a man of the time in this sample.
On the 9th of November, 1860, Mr. Horace Greeley, the great apostle of the Republican party, and who was often referred to during Mr. Lincoln's administration as the "power behind the throne -- greater than the throne itself" -- said in his paper, the New York Tribune:
"If the Cotton States consider the value of the Union debatable, we maintain their perfect right to discuss it; nay, we hold with Jefferson, to the inalienable right of communities to alter or abolish forms of government that have become oppressive or injurious: and if the Cotton States decide that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. The right to secede may be a revolutionary one, but it exists nevertheless; and we do not see how one party can have a right to do what another party has a right to prevent."
On the 17th of December, 1860, just three days before the secession of South Carolina, he again said in the Tribune, "If it [the Declaration of Independence] justified the secession from the British Empire of three millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of five millions of Southernors from the Federal Union in 1861. If we are mistaken on this point, why does not some one attempt to show wherein and why?"
Again, on February the 23rd, five days after the inauguration of President Davis at Montgomery, he said:
"We have repeatedly said, and we once more insist, that the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of American Independence -- that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed -- is sound and just, and if the Slave States, the Cotton States, or the Gulf States only, choose to form an independent nation, they have a clear moral right to do so."
I don't believe one can reasonably argue the confederates as "traitors." They had a right to choose as free men be they right or wrong. And choose they did. A lost cause for sure, but nonetheless certainly not traitors as you suggest...but free men making a decision they paid dearly for as did the UNION.
What difference should it make to you personally what JW puts on his tombstone? At the same time, this article is about 3000 confederates. They believed in states rights. They fought and died for states rights under the confederate flag of those seceded states. The fact they lost the battle for states rights is no reason to dishonor them nor give you the right to call them traitors.
Can anyone here truly deny that we are a divided country to this day?
The South tried to fight mainly a defensive war, not because that's all they could fight, but because all they wanted was to be left alone. But Sherman in his kindness burned down half the South on his little Southern jaunt. Interesting isn't it that when the South marched all through Pennsylvania, there is not recorded one such act on the level of Sherman.
Just goes to show who the REAL gentlemen were in that war. And as for me, I fly the flag of the Confederacy.
Walt
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