Saturday, June 20, 2015

Take Down the Confederate Flag—Now

What Ta-Nehisi Coates said:
That the Confederate flag is the symbol of of white supremacists is evidenced by the very words of those who birthed it:
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...
This moral truth—“that the negro is not equal to the white man”—is exactly what animated Dylann Roof. More than any individual actor, in recent history, Roof honored his flag in exactly the manner it always demanded—with human sacrifice.
Also what Jon Stewart said:
“The Confederate flag flies over South Carolina, and the roads are named for Confederate generals,” Mr. Stewart continued, “and the white guy is the one who feels like his country is being taken away from him.”

Meanwhile Clarence Thomas finally gets a clue and joins with the liberal majority:
But it was in a third case, Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc.,that Thomas made his voice heard most clearly—by his silence. In Walker, Thomas defected from the very First Amendment orthodoxy he defended in Reed. Remarkably enough, he joined the Court’s four moderate-liberals—Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan—to provide a decisive vote to allow the state of Texas to refuse to print a specialty license plate bearing the much-loved and hated Confederate battle flag. In an opinion by Breyer, the 5-4 majority held that a government can, with few limits, decide to convey any license-plate message it wants, and bar any that it disapproves. This isn’t “content-based” regulation of speech; The plate is speech by the government itself, and the First Amendment does not apply.