Actually, it goes back a little further, to an op-ed that appeared in The New York Times in 1991. The author was a scallywagging Southern hand-licker liberal named Garganus, and his piece ran about three years after "Pinchy" Sulzberger took over the editorship of the paper and turned its editorial (and personnel) policy hard to the left on the subject of homosexuality.
Whether "Pinchy" ordained similar turns to the left on other subjects, I'd be interested to know, but it would seem in retrospect that the campaign against the Confederate Battle Flag began with his assumption of the mantle.
Thanks for the info. I wasn’t aware of the Garganus editorial, but it doesn’t surprise me that Sulzberger’s New York Treason would be the launching pad for anti-Confederacy Political Correctness.