Posted on 10/18/2001 4:37:00 AM PDT by shuckmaster
MOULTON, Ala. (AP) -- Four more students were suspended Wednesday from two Lawrence County schools for defying dress codes by wearing Confederate flags on their clothing.
The suspensions came as 15 other students at Lawrence County High School in northwest Alabama finished three-day suspensions imposed Monday when they showed up with Confederate flag clothing in defiance of a rule instituted by Principal Ricky Nichols on Friday.
One student at Lawrence County High School was given a three-day suspension for defying the rule, Nichols said. At Speake School, a third-grader, fifth-grader and eighth-grader were sent home for one-day suspensions Wednesday for wearing T-shirts with rebel flags, Principal Earl Leonard said.
Leonard said the students got opportunities to change into other T-shirts or turn theirs inside out. He said their parents chose to take the children home.
Nichols, in his first year at Lawrence County High School, said that since the fall term began he has been reassuring minority students and parents that there was nothing to fear from children wearing clothes with depictions of Confederate flags.
But Nichols instituted the new rule after racial slurs were used in two incidents last week.
Suspended Lawrence County High School students and parents said the shirts are a display of Southern heritage and had nothing to do with race.
John
Your servant, sir.
Edd
For me, ultimately, it is about my love for the United States of America above all other nations--and flags. The Confederacy represents rebellion of wicked men against the rule of law, and against the Stars and Stripes.
I find continued glorification of that rebellion to be repulsive, especially at this time.
Ahhh that is why my poor as dirt great eversogreat grandfather fought for the Confederacy. It was all the slaves he wanted (but never owned) right... You are an eyesore. Be gone.
BTW. What is wrong with a person putting cars up on blocks. Does it offend you what a person does with his/her property?? I have a Dodge truck that is in process of both decay and repair up on blocks here. It's front end is messed up due to my dad using it to push the firetruck up the mountain during an ice storm for some family we don't even know. I hope to fix it up, but even don't, we paid hard earned cash for it. Do your rights to banishing so called eyesores supercede other property owner rights? If I consider you an eyesore could I banish you? No... Get off your high horse..
We are glad to lose the likes of you in Alabama...
Statements like this are what fuels debate about displaying the Confederate flag. You have, with one sentence, divided the country into Patriots and non-Patriots, based upon geography.
So, where are you going to move to?
I once saw a T-shirt with the perfect comeback to this: A picture of Albert Einstein with some physics equations, and the inscription: "It's a white thing, you wouldn't understand"
Look in the 10th amendment. The people retain the right to maintain the Union in perpetuity. So far, they have done so.
Walt
You oughtta be on the supreme court if you can draw that conclusion out of the 10th.
Walt
"It is sometimes alleged that three states (New York, Virginia, and Rhode Island) reserved the right to secede when ratifying the US Constitution. However, Andrew C. McLaughlin, *A Constitutional History of the United States.* (1935 edition) argues (IMO persuasively) they did not support the concept of the right to secede at will which most Southern secessionists used in 1860-1. As McLaughlin notes, it is important to distinguish between two concepts of secession. One is that a state as "sovereign" has the right to withdraw from the Union *at will* and the second is the idea of the right to secede as a variant of the right to resist tyrannical authority--in other words, another version of the right to revolution. McLaughlin argues that the "reservations" made by state ratifying conventions which were later used to support the right of secession-at-will actually support only the second concept. (E.g., Virginia's "that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whenever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression...") Under the second concept, which Madison shared, the right to resist was not limited to state governments. Madison wrote in 1832: "It is true that in extreme cases of oppression justifying a resort to original rights, and in which passive obedience & non-resistance cease to be obligatory under any Government, a single State *or any part of a State* might rightfully cast off the yoke." [Emphasis added] In other words, as McLaughlin notes, we are dealing with "the right of self-preservation and the right to *resist* government which any individual or group is supposed to have, and not the right of a sovereign body to retire from a league." McLaughlin, p. 276
If we are to accept the second concept, we must ask just what oppression the Southern states were suffering in late 1860 which would justify secession. The perfectly legal election of Abraham Lincoln does not seem a sufficient answer, nor do the Personal Liberty laws of some Northern states (which in any event freed few if any slaves). (The tariff? The votes to raise the tariff weren't there in Congress until the secessionist Senators and Representatives resigned!) It was of course the first concept (the Union as a league from which states might withdraw at will) on which most secessionists relied in 1860. (There were a few exceptions, though: "Alfred Iverson [of Georgia], for example, confessed to the Senate that the Constitution did not give a state the right to secede. 'I rather agree [he said]...that the secession of a State is an act of revolution.' It was that right which he rose to defend." Kenneth M. Stampp, *And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis 1860-61* [Phoenix Books edition 1964], p. 34.)
Whether this first concept is valid depends on how the Constitution is interpreted. For example, take the Supremacy Clause. Advocates of the right to secede say that it only means that *as long as they stay in the Union* states must recognize the Constitution as the supreme law. Opponents retort that secession is illegal *precisely because* in a seceded state the Constitution would no longer be the supreme law. Simply reading the words literally, you could support either interpretation. (Note that the Tenth Amendment will not help us here. If the anti-secessionists are right in their interpretation of the clause, then the Tenth Amendment will not help secessionists, because secession will be a power "prohibited...to the States." If the pro-secessionists are right, secession would be legal even if there were no Tenth Amendment.
The Tenth Amendment does *not* include any rule about whether the powers delegated to the federal government--or prohibited to the states--are to be interpreted broadly or narrowly; as will be pointed out below, it differs significantly in this respect from the Articles of Confederation which uses the word "expressly.") Well, you might say, if the language itself is inconclusive, look to history. But most scholars who have examined the question have found that the history is ambiguous. There are very few statements at the time saying flatly that there is a right to secede and very few flatly denying it. The argument that there is no right to secede was most often used by Anti-Federalists as an argument against ratifying the Constitution. ("Once ratify, and there is no going back.") Luther Martin cautioned that if a Bill of Rights were not adopted later, "you cannot free yourself from the yoke you will have placed on your necks." Martin foresaw a time when a state might be driven to resist federal oppression, but, he noted, the proposed Constitution provides that a citizen who supports his state would be "guilty of a direct act of treason; reducing, by this provision, the different states to this alternative,-that they must tamely and passively yield to despotism, or their citizens must oppose it at the hazard of the halter, if unsuccessful." At the Convention, Martin had wanted a clause declaring that no act done by one or more states against the United States *or by any citizen of any one of the United States under state authority* should be deemed treason or punished as such, "but in case of war being levied by one or more of the States against the United States, the conduct of each party toward the other, and their adherents respectively, shall be regulated by the *laws of war* and of *nations.*" (Needless to say, Martin's proposed clause was rejected.) Generally, Federalists neither confirmed nor denied the warnings of "there's no going back once you ratify." They would not say that there was a right to secede--for one thing, as the statements made by Madison showed, they didn't believe there was any such right (except perhaps as a right of revolution in cases of extreme oppression). And there seemed little point in ratifying a Constitution which would be *weaker* than the old Confederation because easier to dissolve. On the other hand, agreeing that ratification would bind a state forever would not help the cause of the new Constitution. So, on the whole, they kept silent on the issue.
All in all, I lean toward the anti-secessionist side, because if it really *were* understood that there was a right to secede, all the arguments in the Convention and the ratifying conventions about whether the Constitution gave too much power to the federal government at the expense of the states would be pointless. Ratification would be, to use the phrase of a later era, a "no-brainer." "*Of course* we should ratify; it can't do us any harm, because we can always secede at will!" If *this* were the general sentiment, why all the fierce debate? It was not Lincoln but James Buchanan (who was equally convinced of the illegality of secession) who gave the classic argument here: "In that mighty struggle between the first intellects of this or any other country, it never occurred to any individual, either among its opponents or advocates, to assert or even to intimate that their efforts were all vain labor, because the moment that any state felt herself aggrieved she might secede from the Union. What a crushing argument would this have proved against those who dreaded that the rights of the States would be endangered by the Constitution!" But all this has nothing (directly) to do with what-if history: so here is my what-if. What if the Tenth Amendment had taken the form of its source in the Articles of Confederation: "Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled." Notice how the Tenth Amendment's language differs significantly. It does *not* say that the states are "sovereign" and it pointedly leaves out the the requirement that powers must be "expressly" delegated to the United States--a fact which has been seized upon by advocates of implied powers. Would this different Tenth Amendment--the POD for its adoption by reluctant Federalists is simply to have enough states insist on it--make any difference? Or would the word "expressly" simply be construed so broadly as to make it lose all significance?"
--from the ACW newsgroup.
Walt
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