Enough is enough! It’s time to ban the Confederate flag once and for all.
To be honest, it’s an embarrassment that we didn’t do this 150 years ago. I mean seriously, the South lost; get over it.
The Confederate flag was (and always will be) a symbol of white supremacy. One could even say it is a form of hate speech.
I know there are a lot of people who argue that it’s not a symbol of hate, but rather a symbol of pride and heritage. But here’s my counterargument: those who fought on behalf of the South have said loud and clear what the Confederacy stands for. Take, for example, this excerpt from Alexander H. Stephens’ “Cornerstone Speech”:
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
Alexander H. Stephens, if you’ll recall, served as vice president of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. I think he was pretty explicit in where the South stood on this issue. That’s why it’s not okay to embody a symbol based on hate.
“It would be like having the swastika flag flying on your next-door neighbor,” Whoopi Goldberg once said on an episode of The View. “If [the Confederate flag] continues to fly, the statement that’s being made … is that ‘We miss this really crappy part of history.'”
Speaking of swastikas, did you know that after World War II and the defeat of the Nazi regime, Germany banned all symbols of Nazism? Yep, that’s right; to this day it is illegal to display a swastika or any other insignia associated with Hitler’s regime.
My question is: if Germany can ban a symbol because of its historical context, why can’t the U.S. do the same?
