The Confederate Flag Desecration

[realFedUp]

The Confederate Flag Desecration
Messing with the First Amendment has consequences.

http://www.campusprogress.org/features/364/the-confederate-flag-desecration

By Jamin Raskin and Michael Anderson

When the House of Representatives passed the flag desecration constitutional amendment last week, did the Southern conservatives voting yes understand that they were taking a giant first step towards criminalizing display of the Confederate flag?

Everyone knows, of course, that the Confederate flag was the banner of secession and treason, as the Union saw it. But most people don’t know that the Confederate flag design itself was a taunting rip-off and physical desecration of the Stars-and-Stripes. It takes the physical elements of the Union flag and rearranges them in a deliberate parody: five-pointed white stars, against a blue background, against a red field suggesting blood or fire. In the first year of the Civil War, the Richmond Dispatch explained it well:

As the old flag itself was not the author of our wrongs, we tore off a piece of the dear old rag and set it up as a standard. We took it for granted a flag was a divisible thing, and proceeded to set off our proportion. So we took, at a rough calculation, our share of the stars and our fraction of the stripes, and put them together and called them the Confederate flag.

Richmond Dispatch, “The Confederate Flag,” 7 December 1861. When Confederate flag-makers used a soft pink background for the first Confederate battle-flags, General P.G.T. Beauregard demanded a more murderous theme: “dye it red sir, dye it with your blood!”

continued

[MazeRat7]

1. Understand ? Not a chance. I doubt they have a clue how it came to be.

Thanks for the post. I had heard something like that in the past, but never seen it described. I do like history however.. and that was an interesting tid-bit.

MZr7

[htuttle]

2. Wiping my ass with the confederate flag...

... would be showing it more respect than it deserves.