Mixing good & evil

I don't know about others, but I was raised to believe that profanation was when someone mixed something that was good with something that was evil.  The good never alleviated the evil;  the evil always subjugate the good. 

In a 06/19/15 NY Times op-ed piece, Ben Jones, who was in The Dukes of Hazzard before serving in the US House of Representatives as a Georgia Democrat & is now chief of heritage operations for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, notes, "To those 70 million of us whose ancestors fought for the South, it (the Confederate flag) is a symbol of family members who fought for what they thought was right in their time, and whose valor became legendary in military history." 

When I wrote in an earlier blog posting about heritage & tradition serving as a filmy gauze over the lens of history, this statement was the sort of thing is what I had in mind.  The Confederate flag is a symbol of ancestors who  "fought for what they thought was right in their time."  Being in the relatively distant past can't wash away the stain that "what they thought was right in their time" was having the United States be fully open to any state welcoming slavery.  

The War Between the States was fought over state's rights - true.  But southerners artfully forget the specific right being contested - to expand slavery into any new state coming into the Union.  

The unfiltered truth is that the South was in the constitutional right - slavery should, under the Constitution, be a state issue.  Congress tried to maintain a balance between slave & free states, hoping to not only keep a balance of power between the two but also to help avoid other territories becoming another Bloody Kansas. 

The South was in the technical right, it should have been up to each territory. But the possibility of unlimited expansion of slavery into new states was  doomed because Americans considered our country a Christian nation & slavery is flat-out morally wrong.

The South had only itself to blame for the complete abolition of slavery.  State by state seceded, then fought against the Union it once helped form, and lost.  

FACT:  The South didn't fight because slavery might be banned within existing borders.  Read Lincoln's 1st Inaugural for his feelings on the issue.  It was fought because southern leaders - and profiteers, in the North & in Europe - wanted unlimited growth.   

When people like Ted Cruz say things like, "But I also understand those who want to remember the sacrifices of their ancestors and the traditions of their states, not the racial oppression, but the historical traditions," they profane the issue.  The ancestors died for the right to expand slavery throughout the United States.  Racial oppression was the very bedrock of their cause.  

Look no further than the Confederacy's own Vice President Alexander Stephens, who proclaimed in his cause-defining Cornerstone Speech:
The prevailing ideas entertained by him (Thomas Jefferson) and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically....

Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone 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.  


Good people who love the Confederate flag need to realize that the defeated battle flag has always been profaned, representing for some a heritage of suppression & others honored traditions based 4-square on a dishonorable heritage.  That's the unfiltered truth.  If you question it, reread Alexander Stephens' comments.

I was taught that people who profane truth by mixing it with evil can't go to heaven because they can't separate the one from the other - they are forever muddled together & the evil will always subjugate the good.  The same is true with the Confederate flag & always has been - we can't separate the good messages from the evil ones & the evil will always subjugate the good.