The Right to Be Southern White Supremacists

The Texas Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans want to build (another) monument that glorifies Texas’ contribution in the War of Northern Aggression, known elsewhere as the Civil War. They want to build one in sleepy Orange, Texas which is perched on the Texas-Louisiana border.

 

Such a monument, they say, will “attract people to the region,” especially when they see a Confederate battle flag fluttering in the breeze, visible from Interstate 10.Indeed, said a Sons of Confederate Veterans-Texas Division public relations officer “the more education about the South and what they were fighting for, the more compassion people will have for the Confederates and what they did.”

So they want to build a monument in Orange, Texas, as soon as it stops raining.A

And that, one supposes, is because monuments to Texas Confederate soldiers is rarer than hen’s teeth in this state. Oh, except for the lawn surrounding the state capitol building in Austin where one cannot walk 20 feet in any direction without running into one.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans say that they are simply trying to spread their message of truth about the real reason that the South seceded from the Union in 1861, and it had nothing at all to do with slavery.

No, really, slavery had nothing to do with it.

It was all about states’ rights and the 10^th Amendment.

Sort of like it is now.

If a state determined that it was right and proper for one man to own another as chattel then that’s a states’ rights issue, not a moral issue. Not at all.

And really, it is good and proper for the Sons of Confederate Veterans to spread their words of truth because that is their 1^st Amendment right to do so. It is completely within their rights to put these monuments up just as it is completely within the rights of American Nazis to assemble and extol the virtues of Adolf Hitler and the advantages of National Socialism.

It is, in short, their right to look, act, and speak in a manner repugnant to the vast majority of Americans. It is a further reminder of just how base some people can be, and it helps us all if they identify themselves for us so we can avoid them and do harm to their cause.