"VA cemetery ban" Topic

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I guess if the deceased is in a non VA cemetery than you can still fly the flag of your choice. Deceased veterans do not have First Amendment rights.

As I understand it you can still put small flags of your choice on individual graves. Just not fly the flag of another country on the big flag pole paid for by US tax dollars.

And it says nothing about putting a flag on an individual grave. (Scott beat me to the post button)

Sorry, I can't seem to muster any outrage.

"Just not fly the flag of another country on the big flag pole paid for by US tax dollars." Well it is a U.S. cemetery.

Sorry, I can't seem to muster any outrage.

Then you can't join "The Cult of the Victim".

Sounds 100% appropriate to me.

When do they start exhuming bodies?

Yeah as long as you can still put the little flags, and as long as this is public property(and not private or foreign property-like Commonwealth cemeteries, or the Turkish military cemetery in Athens) this seems an appropriate decision. This is the USA, not the CSA. That said as a courtesy the US might permit people to fly the CSA flag at cemeteries (like it happens in some multi-national military cemeteries in Europe).

That said as a courtesy the US might permit people to fly the CSA flag at cemeteries (like it happens in some multi-national military cemeteries in Europe).

Those are tend to be Allied Cemeteries, the Axis forces have separate burial ground.

The ban, to my understanding, is specifically against the so-called "Confederate battleflag." My thought about getting around that is to fly the CSA 1st National flag. No one but a history nerd (like me ) would know what it represented.

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Plus the Senate hasn't even considered the bill yet so it is not final.

Jim

Ha my GSU students now know what the relationship is betwen the Georgia State Flag and the CSA First National Flag ;)

When do they start exhuming bodies?

Rallynow…do you REALLY want an answer to that question? I can provide it for you….

You'd be surprised…

There are Confederate Veteran cemetaries around. The one I see the most often in on I65 right below Clanton Alabama.

In a Clay County Alabama church semetary there is a Union soldier buried there. He was from Ohio. On two sides of him are Confederate veterans. I have never known the grave to be vandalized.

There is a CSA Cemetery outside Ft. Benning GA., IIRC. And in Columbus, OH where there was a POW camp during the ACW.

That would be the Camp Chase cemetery in Columbus,OH,Legion 4. Been there myself.

Murphy,

Nothing would surprise me. I expect that has been taking place. So sad, most of the common CS soldiers never owned a slave.

I'm joining 79thPA and surrendering my membership in "The Cult of the Victim." But it's only temporary, I must preserve my right to self-identify as a victim.

I understand that two years after the war, the Union occupation forces in Raleigh required the town residents to dig up the confederate dead they had buried during the war in the old Rock Quarry cemetery so that it could be used as a new National Cemetery for Union troops. The locals purchased land from the Mordecai plantation and moved the bodies creating the new Oakwood Cemetery and its confederate section. Further exasperating the locals, the union forces prohibited marking the new graves (but the locals secretly made maps with names) until the 1960s.

Next time 'round, make sure you guys win instead, so we don't have to hear about it for another 150 years.

I believe the South bears the burden of starting this war. But that doesn't mean we have to disrespect the soldiers who fought for the CSA anymore than the those who fought for the USA.

Most of the common soldiers didn't know squat about the politics or owned a slave. They were defending their home and families.

I think a good compromise is to place the soldier's state flag instead of any CS flag. But that is only if we know what state the soldier was from.

You can put whatever you want on the individual soldiers grave.

That's not what the article talks about at all.

Looks like an FWP to me:

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Thanks Wolfman, next time I'm down that way, I should stop …

The federal and state governments are exercising their own free speech rights to stop endorsing the Battle Flag as a symbol. (Look it up, you have no First Amendment right to compel the government to parrot your opinions.)

And that doesn't mean federal or state governments are no longer honoring Confederate veterans. There is a difference between taking down the Battle Flag, and foregoing all respect for these men.

Take Texas as a case in point. Well before the South Carolina shootings, Texas refused to put the Battle Flag on custom license plates. The resulting lawsuit, brought by the Sons of Confederate Veterans on First Amendment grounds, went all the way to the Supreme Court--which confirmed that Texas can decline to issue Battle Flag plates if it does not want to. (Even Rick Perry was opposed to the Battle Flag plates…)

At the same time, two of the most prominent memorials on the Texas Capitol grounds are massive statuaries to Confederate servicemen. They are detailed, with inscriptions that explain exactly what is being commemorated--service in defense of the homeland.

The Battle Flag standing alone, unfortunately, has been coopted as a symbol of pure racism and "white power." It is often directed at black Americans as an overt threat of racial violence. That's the reality today, no matter how proud you may be of what happened 150 years ago.

No one is stopping us from displaying the Battle Flag on private property. Personally, I've got loads of Battle Flags on my figures. I'm sure one of you guys will chime in and say that PC boogy-men are going to come take them away. If you believe that, you really don't know anything about the Constitution you claim to cherish. Not to mention being completely divorced from reality…

What the anti-flag crowd seems to not get (or more likely willfully ignore) is the concept of "context". The context in which a symbol appears is essential in determining what the intended message is. There is a world of difference in the context and the intended message of a rebel battle flag being flown on a monument to Confederate war dead or a bumper sticker on the vehicle of a Sons of Confederate Veterans member than the context and the intended message of a flag being flown at a Klan rally. It's really not that hard to differentiate between the context in most cases.

After all, used in the right context even the most benign of symbols can be misused to spread a harmful message. For example both the pro-Nazi German American Bund in the 1930s and Rockwell's American Nazi Party/NSWPP in the '60s used images of George Washington in their iconography. (no, I have no idea either…) Yet no one at the time or in the years since have cited that misuse of an otherwise positive symbol as a reason to tear down the Washington Monument or remove his face from the one dollar bill. That would, of course, be absurd. Instead common sense and judging intent via context prevail. It should be the same with the rebel battle flag. But instead the anti-flag sorts are often driven by intellectual laziness, ignorance, and (in some cases) actual malevolent intent.

When do they start exhuming bodies?

I know you were being hyperbolic, but amazingly, that's not far from the truth. I recall reading a while back that the Memphis city government voted to exhume the body of Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife to move their remains out of the park that bears his name. I'm not sure if that ever occurred, but that it was even entertained is shameful.

But what do I know?

"Memphis city government voted to exhume the body of Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife to move their remains out of the park that bears his name."

Forrest, himself choose a site in Elmwood cemetery. He was dug up and moved to that park by the KKK in 1904 against his family's wishes. The park has been renamed, but he is still there. The KKK just recently offered to take him and his statue and put it on private property in Harrison Arkansas.

Interesting.
I was not aware of that bit of the story, EJNASHIII.

That being said, I rather doubt the city officials who voted for moving his grave were motivated by wanting to honor the man's wishes as to his final resting place. ;-)

Call me old fashioned, but even bad people should be given dignity in death.

Just a minor point – the USA has never recognized the CSA as another Nation-State. The USA has always maintained the CSA was made of US States that were in Rebellion against the legitimate gov't. Therefore, the flags of the CSA are not the flags of a foreign gov't.

Funny as a child I was always told that the most horrible part of the battles was that all the casualties were Americans. I guess no longer. Is the Confederacy truly an independent country since the did not win the war thus nothaving their independency recognized?

The people who created the flag certainly considered it as the flag of another country. In any case it is not a US flag and it is highly questionable whether it has a place on a US flag pole at a US cemetery.

I prefer to think that they are UN-rewriting history. The South re-wrote the history starting about one day after Lee surrendered from a war to preserve slavery to a gallant lost cause about states rights. Just setting the record straight.

But we are straying into Blue Fez territory, I'm thinking…