Racist Flag

From MSN:
"Republicans Tread Carefully in Criticism of Confederate Flag"

The massacre of nine African-Americans in a storied Charleston church last week, which thrust the issues of race relations and gun rights into the center of the 2016 presidential campaign, has now resurfaced another familiar and divisive question in the emerging contest for the Republican nomination: what to do with the Confederate battle flag that flies on the grounds of the South Carolina Capitol. And similarly to some of their predecessors seeking to win the state’s first-in-the-South primary election, the leading Republican candidates are treading delicately so as not to risk offending the conservative white voters who venerate the most recognizable emblem of the Confederacy. Jeb Bush issued a statement on Saturday indicating he was confident that South Carolina “will do the right thing.” As Florida’s governor, Mr. Bush in 2001 ordered the Confederate flag to be taken from its public display outside his state’s Capitol. Senator Marco Rubio, also of Florida, told reporters he thought the state would “make the right choice for the people of South Carolina.” But neither candidate would state explicitly whether they wanted South Carolina to remove from state-sanctioned display a flag that for many African-Americans represents a particularly searing reminder of slavery. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin begged off entirely from questions about what to do with the flag in South Carolina or whether it represents racism, saying that he would not address any such matters until the victims of the mass shooting were buried. The carefully calibrated answers were a vivid illustration of the challenge Republicans face in attempting, simultaneously, to broaden their party’s appeal to minorities while also energizing those white conservatives who are uneasy about what they see as bowing to political correctness. Three days after a 21-year-old white man with a recent history of anti-black views, is believed to have killed Clementa Pinckney, a pastor and state senator, along with eight members of Charleston’s, historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the presidential campaign finally caught up to a country reeling from the gruesome display of racial terror. Mr. Bush came the closest, recalling when he was governor of Florida, the state moved a Confederate flag “from the state grounds to a museum where it belonged.” But he went no further than predicting that South Carolina would “do the right thing.”

If the Republicans were reluctant to call directly for the flag to come down, they realized that they had to speak more plainly about the racial motivation behind the attack. The fight over the flag’s placement has a long history in South Carolina. It was originally placed atop the Capitol during the administration of Gov. Fritz Hollings, a Democrat, in 1962 as the civil rights movement gained steam, ostensibly to mark the centennial of the Civil War. There was a push in the late 1990s to take it down, an effort which partly contributed to the defeat of a Republican governor who supported its removal. The flag would continue to fly above South Carolina’s copper-domed Capitol until 2000, when a bipartisan agreement was reached moving it to a Confederate memorial nearby.

 

 

^ I don't care if you are Republican, Democrat or apolitical. No one should want to wave, salute, fly or fight for a Confederate flag. There is a reason the racist, segregationists used the same flag during the Civil Rights Movement. They knew it stood for hating anyone who wasn't white and Protestant during the American Civil War and kept using it to show their support for Jim Crow. Anyone who wears or flies a Confederate flag might as well also wear a white hood. All symbols of the Confederacy should be banned in the US the same way Nazi symbols are banned in Germany (and other European countries) and Soviet symbols are banned (also in several European countries.) The only flag that should be protected in the United States is the Stars and Stripes. ^

 

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/republicans-tread-carefully-in-criticism-of-confederate-flag/ar-AAbV8QJ?srcref=rss