Oh, how the righties have their tighty-whities in the wrong bunch!

What Starnes conveniently forgets is that the Confederate BATTLE flag was first used in the post-Civil War era by the KKK, and its sole purpose was to intimidate the newly-freed Blacks.

He also conveniently forgets that the current “battle” over the flag is the DIRECT result of white supremacists (almost exclusively in the South) using the flag to symbolize DEFIANCE against the Federal government’s decision to enforce school desegregation laws as well as pressing for full rights to Blacks (while bigotry itself wasn’t limited to the South, you didn’t see white legislatures in Michigan, California and New Jersey raising the Battle flag to display their bigotry). The flag that’s come under such criticism in recent days in South Carolina did NOT fly over the State Capitol (or any other State government building) until 1961—on the 100th anniversary of the day that Confederate forces fired on the Union garrison at Fort Sumter. As a sidenote, just 13 years earlier, the flag started making a return to prominence conservative Southern racist Democrats (who would later become the Dixiecrats) started protesting Truman’s desegregating the military. And at that year’s Democratic convention, Southern delegates were raucous and waved Confederate flags in support of Georgia Senator Russell’s nomination against Truman. When Truman got the nomination, these Democrats split to form the avowedly racist, segregationist Dixiecrat Party (officially the States’ Rights Democratic Party) and won the full electoral votes of four states (LA, MI, AL, and, of course, SC; the party also got 1 elector from TN).

Kind of ironically, the current state flag of SC (the blue field with the palmetto and crescent moon) was first adopted after the state seceded and was retained after the War.

If the Confederate flag is Southern culture, then that culture is long overdue for a cleansing.

How ironic that it is Starnes and his ultra right-wing friends that attempting to do the “cultural cleansing” ….how should I say it best..,“whitewashing” the fact that the “Concerned Citizens Councils”…the ones that fought tooth and nail to prevent integration…the ones that became the “Concerned Conservatives Councils” are STILL doing their utmost to prevent minorities from exercising their constitution right to vote.

’Southern Heritage" STILL refers to traitors whose rallying cry of “states rights” meant the right to own slaves. I have no doubt that many of the people who are “outraged” about the Confederate flag would if they could, happily return to the days when whites could own black people as slaves.

let individuals retain the right to display it, let it be displayed in historical exhibit, but a gov’t agency shouldn’t raise it on a pole. that’s all we really should ask for.

What. A. Freakin. Putz.

I guess no one has told this idiot Starnes the South lost the war. Why celebrate the losers? This flag is nothing but a huge middle finger aimed by rascists at the rest of the country.

only 150 years too late!

Figures!