And I agree, I am not for banning it. I just won’t fly it!

Great post Ronnica!

@ Night Damsel, thanks for stopping by. Your question helps me clarify what I think in my head, too. You’re definitely right about the post not being about the Civil War or free speech directly.

To be honest, I’m bothered that the state is selling these types of plates at all. I don’t feel like the government should do what someone else would gladly do (sell this merchandise). In fact, the state is not filling in a gap, as this type of merchandise can be found in about any mall throughout the state. It’s just that the Confederate flag happened to be offensive to me. Potentially, other plates might have bothered others (though I only remember sports teams’ ones, a Harley one, and a John Deere one, there may have been something else offensive). That’s why I bothered writing about it at all. Without the Confederate flag being on the wall in a government office, the issues of selling vanity plates there would have just been another example of government overstepping their bounds. But with that plate on the wall, they had a symbol of rebellion against the US government (among other things that it does/could stand for) as well as (to many, including me) racism.

I would not have a problem with them selling religious symbols on vanity plates per se, though I’d rather them not sell anything in the office at all. I’m not against states that allow personal expressions on license plates produce ones with religious symbols on them (I believe this is a current issue in Florida). After doing a little research, I found that there has been some debate in that state recently about allowing the Confederate flag to be on the license plate as well. I’m torn on this: is it free speech or is it merely government-approved racism? I need to think about this more before coming to an opinion.

First of all, I was not really discussing what the Confederate flag stood for in the day, but rather what it stands for now. No matter how much anyone tries, it’s not possible to strip it of it’s racist connotations. When I still lived in Kansas, a middle school boy got suspended for drawing a Confederate flag on a piece of paper and handing it to a black classmate. It was considered a hate crime for good reason (though I doubt the boy was a racist, he was simply getting in trouble like many boys like to do).

I agree, the Civil War (a war between factions within a nation, which seems like an apt title to me) was not primarily about slavery. Studying the war in college was eye-opening to me. It was about the rights of the states vs. the rights of the central government. I do think that we have gone too far in centralizing the government. The government gets it’s hands in lots of things it shouldn’t. (for instance, the selling of merchandise that in the license plate store, though that was the state government, which is no less prone to sticking it’s fingers where it doesn’t belong!). We agree on that point.

Though states have greater rights and the central government ought to have less power than they do now, that doesn’t mean that states have the right to secede. We ARE one nation. That was what was decided by the Civil War. Whether states should have the right to secede or not certainly can be debated, but I happen to believe that the nation should be whole with a smaller central government than we have now.

Dar, I don’t think that everyone who flies a Confederate flag is a racist. I just think that they need a different symbol (such as their state flag) that doesn’t have the racial and rebellious issues if they are supporting states’ rights or Southern pride.

I hope you come back again, I enjoy discussing these issues!

First, the Civil War is only called that because the North won. The winners decide the name of the war. Down here in the South it was known as the “War of Northern Aggression,” and with good reason. The North attacked us first.

Wait, wait, but Southerns fired on Fort Sumter, SC. Wouldn’t that mean that you guys attacked first?

I honestly don’t care which position you take. From the South standpoint (specifically SC at this point) they had given the US soldiers time to evacuate. They seceded and became a separate and distinct nation. Therefore, the US troops were now no longer on US territory. After the stated time told to the US government, the Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter because the US troops had not left. This essentially equivocated an invasion.

Also, many say that the Civil War (a.k.a. the War of Northern Aggression) was about slavery. From the research I have done on this topic I have concluded that this is just not true. The War was about State’s Rights. Slavery was a side-issue brought in to motivate the Northerns to fight. Lincoln, while certainly not agreeing with slavery, said that his paramount object in the War of the States was neither to preserve or destroy slavery, it was simply to save the Union.

This is evidenced in the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in the States that were members of the CSA. (Which, honestly, would be about as absurd as us now declaring all slaves in Sierra Leone free. It’s another country, they have their own laws, and no authority is granted to another nation in either case to dictate another countries laws.)

If the war was about slavery and freeing the slaves than wouldn’t it make sense for Lincoln to have simultaneously freed the slaves of the North? If the War was about freeing slaves why did Lincoln promise that any state joining the Union would be able to keep their slaves?

No, the War was about State’s Rights. That’s why, after the war, many of the Southern States had to give up some of their former rights as States in order to re-join the Union. The Federal government wanted to discourage and prevent any more secessions.

This has, IMO, caused many problems today. Since the War the Federal government has consistently seized more and more of the States rights and power. This goes against how our Founding Fathers designed this great nation. There were to be checks and balances to make sure that no one (including, and especially the Federal government) from obtaining too much power.

This is what the CSA stands for to me: State’s Rights. Not slavery and bigotry – the North was infected with that disease just as much as the South. This is what the CSA is, this is what the Confederate flag stands for. This is why I will be proud to fly it ’till my dying day. Not because I agree with slavery, because I don’t. Not because I hate blacks, because I don’t (many of my good friends are African or African-American). But our Federal government has way too much power in their hands, and the States should have much more power than they do.