S.C., don鈥檛 go growin鈥� a conscience for us now!
“It’s time to move the flag from the Capitol grounds.”
South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, on her state’s Confederate flag
I’ve heard that a century and a half ago, a group of enterprising southerners started a war just so they could maintain their economic system based on the ownership of other human beings. If they’d succeeded, by 2015, they’d be able to buy and sell whole families on eBay. Sure glad they lost.
That’s not why I’m writing this. But excuse me while I unclench my fists, so I can continue typing!
The night that Dylann Storm Roof exacted his inexplicable hatred on the participants of a prayer meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, it was yet another reminder that the Civil War was, for some Americans, still unfinished business.
The news media, namely Fox News, refused to acknowledge that racial hatred had motivated Roof. The massacre had taken place inside of a church, so panelists began appearing on Fox to claim that it had merely been an “Attack on Religion.” That’s like saying bank robbers only rob banks, because they hate banks.
Despite eyewitness accounts that Roof had admitted that he loaded a gun and planned to kill African-Americans that night, many conservatives ignored his racist motives. Racism, they’d like us to believe, ended the day President Barack Obama took office.
It’s hard writing these columns when you’d like to punch something!
One of the victims of the attack, Rev. Clementa Pinckney, was also a state senator. The American and South Carolina state flags over the state Capitol building were lowered to half-staff to honor him.
The images of those flags in the background, while a Confederate flag waved at full-staff in the foreground, set off a national discussion — one that was highly embarrassing for lots of Republican presidential nominees.
For days, candidate after candidate sidestepped the propriety of maintaining a symbol of, for many, racial hatred. Some hemmed and hawed, then stuttered their way out of taking a pro or con stand on the flag.
But the most revealing comment came from Mike Huckabee. “Everyone’s being baited with this question as if somehow that has anything to do whatsoever with running for president. My position is it most certainly does not,” he said on NBC”s Meet the Press.
Oh, yeah. Huckabee clearly still believes in “state’s rights.” Isn’t that what the Civil War was about, after all?
If the south had gotten its way, when I drive down through West Virginia, I’d need a passport.
While Republicans scrambled to avoid being, as Huckabee said, “baited” by answering a simple question about the Confederate flag, there was a new development. A hate-filled “manifesto,” supposedly written Roof, became public.
Pictures of Roof burning the American flag, while embracing the Confederate flag, gave proof, again, that it was his symbol of hatred.
Republicans, who’d squirmed before those pictures were released, were now firmly within the glare of a national spotlight for ignoring the obvious.
Last Monday, when Gov. Nikki Haley announced her decision to try to rid the South Carolina Capitol grounds of the Confederate flag, it was hailed as an essential step forward — but not by me. It’s another reminder that Republicans, who stand firmly on their “principles,” can be as dumb as bricks about matters that require immediate judgements.
Whether it was presidential candidate John McCain, in 2008, claiming in the midst of the nation’s near-economic collapse, that “the fundamentals of the economy are sound,” or Mitt Romney, in 2012, with his failed attempts to blame the nation’s 47 percent for all of the nation’s economic problems — Republicans are slow-footed when it counts.
If they aren’t, then why did several Republican candidates wait until Nikki Haley made her decision to try to have the flag removed, before they agreed that it’s a symbol of hate?
In fact, Haley herself had shown no interest in removing the flag as late as last October, when she supported it in a speech last October.
Don’t go growin’ a conscience for us now!
Edward A. Owens is a three time Emmy Award winner and 20 year veteran of television news. Email him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net