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To: cpt757; dr.zaeus
"The confederate flag does not represent hate..."

I liked dr.zaeus's answer because it cuts to the heart of the issue. To a great many people (FWIW: not me) the flag does represent hate. To the degree that is does represents a failure on the part of southerners to protect it. As for the "stay up north" nonsense - I am an American citizen and I go wherever I please. Git o'er it!
208 posted on 05/15/2008 11:33:30 AM PDT by rockrr (Global warming is to science what Islam is to religion)
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To: rockrr

Thanks for the support.

http://www.crwflags.com/FOTW/FLAGS/us-ga3.html

“The United States Supreme Court handed down its opinion in Brown on May 17, 1954, unanimously ruling that racial segregation in the public schools violates the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. To say the Court’s opinion was unpopular would be an understatement. The Georgia state legislature amended its flag law twenty-one months later to change one confederate flag design, the stars and bars, to another, the so-called confederate battle flag. If the Georgia state legislature did change the design to a symbol of racial segregation to protest the Court’s opinion, then the legislature would certainly not been so indiscrete to admit its true reasons on the record.”

After this happened, (and for the decades after) the people who wished to keep this symbol about heritage and not hate should have stood up and fought for it, instead of standing by and waiting for it to be recognized as a symbol of intolerance some 40 years later.

Political opportunists (Democrats I might add) used it to thumb their noses at integration, and as a result, forfeited our right to keep it unsullied without having to stand up and protect it.

I wish to God that we had done something sooner.


211 posted on 05/15/2008 1:04:14 PM PDT by dr.zaeus
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To: rockrr
To a great many people (FWIW: not me) the flag does represent hate.

It is used as a bloody shirt by the NAACP and The New York Times, which printed an op-ed in 1991 saying that the flag should be put away and seen no more in public. They got a Southern hand-licker to write the op-ed.

They made an issue of the flag and its allegedly defining uses. This is an argument they have not deployed consistently. They have never complained about the United States flag, despite abundant archival photography that shows that the Ku Klux Klan, the Silver Shirts, and George Lincoln Rockwell's neo-Nazis never failed to display the U.S. flag at their political demonstrations.

Expressions of opprobrium directed toward any Confederate flag is a mask for opprobrium toward Southerners qua Southerners, because they are Southerners -- it's sectional bigotry and political hate-mongering.

And during election season, it's race-baiting directed toward a mostly-black audience, goading them to vote by reminding them that they (Southerners), the infamous them of liberal political speech, still haven't been beaten enough.

It is also used to try to split off Midwestern conservatives from Southern conservatives, using sectionalism as a crude political tool, as argued by neoconservative author Christopher Caldwell (an editor of the Weekly Standard) in a 1997 article in The Atlantic Monthly entitled, "The Southern Captivity of the GOP", in which he argued that Southern political prominence in the GOP (by virtue of the 1994 recapture of the Congress) would ruin the good name and good reputation of the GOP by association, and cause it to fail politically.

The purge he called for of GOP leadership ranks and expungement of identifiably Southern conservative issues from the GOP platform has largely been accomplished by the GOP Brahminate, at great cost to everyone but the Democrats I might add.

213 posted on 05/15/2008 1:34:44 PM PDT by lentulusgracchus ("Whatever." -- sinkspur)
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