Quote:
Originally Posted by Pat Babaz
Just wondering if ANYBODY has actually had their opinion or mind changed since reading this 9 page thread??
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Perhaps not, but I'm sure a few have realized they had some wrong facts.
I was recently almost convinced to change my mind on the Confederate flag, because a trusted friend explained that the CSA Constitution demonstrated both white supremacy and insisted that the Confederate states maintain legalized slavery in perpetuity. This would have been unacceptable, since forcing states to accept slavery forever is not "states' rights" but rather centralized control.
However, once I carefully read the CSA Constitution, it was clear that the document permitted CSA states to regulate slavery as they saw fit among their own citizens, and that the CSA Constitution was very similar to the US Constitution, except with the minimal clarifications needed to prevent federal intrusion into issues that the US Constitution had left to the states. The states even retained the power to ban slavery in the entire CSA through the amendment process, and (unlike the US Constitution which guaranteed the overseas slave trade for 18 more years but taxed it) the CSA Constitution immediately banned the overseas slave trade.
Certainly, the Confederate flag can be a symbol of different things to different people, but when men were fighting under it, they were fighting for the principles outlined in the CSA Constitution. To be sure, chattle slavery and white supremacy are horrible evils. But the CSA Constitution does not represent these much more strongly than the original US Constitution.
However, in 1861-1865, the CSA Constitution did articulate a resistance to federal centralized control more clearly than the US Constitution. In 2015 it is easy to see how one can understand it to be a symbol for individual and state liberties that have been gradually eroded by the way the US Constitution is bastardized and misinterpreted by the activist federal courts and those who would prefer to accomplish their social agendas through the fiats of an oligarchy rather than through the republican process originally guaranteed by the Constitution.
How is being forced to involuntarily perform labor in ways that violate one's faith and conscience not an example of the "involuntary servitude" banned under the 13th amendment to the US Constitution?
Just as those who supported slavery were supporting evil, ALL who support citizens being forced to involuntarily violate their faith and conscience with forced labor are supporting a horrible evil.