The Texas Department of Motor Vehicles
has opposed issuing license plates that display the Confederate flag. The Sons of Confederate Veterans sued the DMV for the ban, and won their case on appeal in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Now the Texas state Attorney General seeks to bring the argument to the Supreme Court. The fanatical cultural oppression by the Texas AG is outrageous. But why do anti-flag fanatics seek to ban the Confederate flag?
The anti-flag forces seek to ban the flag to uphold their erroneous views as described below:
1. That the Confederacy was evil and wrong "in fighting for slavery."
This view is wrong because the North did not go to war to end slavery, as is popularly but falsely believed, but to compel the Southern states to remain in a union that they no longer wanted. If the North was not fighting to end slavery, the South could not have been fighting to preserve it. The myth that the North fought to end slavery was invented after the war to give a false aura of respectability to Northern aggression and to justify the enormous number of fatalities and widespread destruction.
2 That the Confederate flag's display is "a painful reminder of racism and slavery."
This view is self-serving, in that the American flag is, historically, far more associated with African slavery than the Confederate flag. Its goal is to scapegoat the South for an institution that was well-entrenched decades before there was a Southern Confederacy, and to deny the massive culpability of the North in the support and expansion of the institution.
3. That the Confederate South is solely responsible for the institution of African slavery.
Again, this is to scapegoat the Confederacy -- see rebuttal of No 2 above. Northern states were heavily involved in the slave trade before the Civil War, and other countries both sold and used slave labor, e.g. Portugal, England, France, Cuba, Brazil and the West Indies.
4. That the Confederate flag is "racially insensitive."
This view is is in support of race-huckstering groups like the NAACP, who are totally ineffective at solving the problems of their constituents, e.g. school drop-outs, poverty, illegitimacy, absent fathers and crime. So they attack the Confederate flag instead, so they can point to some kind of success, however meaningless. They must validate their otherwise feckless existence by scapegoating the flag.
6. That the only possible interpretation of the flag's display is to express race hatred.
Although it is true that the flag has sometimes been misused by hate groups, those same groups have likewise used the American flag and the Celtic Cross. However, all of these symbols mean many things to many people, and no one has the right to limit individual interpretations to the lowest common denominator. For example, some might see the American flag as the flag of the genocide of the Plains Indians or the unconstitutional interment of Japanese Americans, or the imperialism of annexing Hawaii and deposing its queen. However, like the American flag, the Confederate flag should be seen in a much wider context.
We fight for the flag for these reasons:
1. We insist that the Confederacy be accorded a respectable place in American history. The scapegoating of the South, and the slanderous falsehoods against it must not be the official position of any federal or state agency.
2. We refuse to allow the Confederate flag to be used as a bogeyman to disrespect our ancestors, their descendants, their country, Southern history, or the Southern section of the nation.
3. We refuse to allow our viewpoint on history to be repressed by "viewpoint discrimination," such as that practiced by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles. We refuse to be acquiescent in the legal proliferation of negative stereotypes of Southerners who are proud of their ancestors and who cherish Southern symbols like the Confederate flag. The Texas Department of Motor Vehicles seeks to enforce its bigotry through legalization, and we will not quietly go along.
4. We refuse to acquiesce to official slander of Southern history or culture, by allowing federal or state governments to ban the Confederate flag, or to define it as "the flag of slavery, racism and oppression."
We will never stop fighting for an honorable place for Confederates in American history. We will never give up.
Mark Levin is an excellent writer and has given a lot to the conservative movement. However, his increasingly asinine remarks on the radio about the American Civil War and the Confederate States of America compel me to finally call him out.
Today I finally had enough, and wrote to Governor Brown. That correspondence is below.
