Southern Heritage Group Declares War On the South

What happens when you put into practice on a local level the principle behind states rights and Jeffersonian Democracy?  Well, according to these folks you’ve violated one of the central pillars of Southern Heritage.  Some of my favorite quotes of the day:

  • From what I’ve been told (and from the “no-response” I received from the Lexington Chamber of Commerce) I don’t think we have a prayer of support from the business community. The whole town is gone, frankly, and should be boycotted. If folks go to pay respect to Lee and Jackson, they should go through the town, pay their respects and leave. Maybe a sign on their car – we don’t support scalawags and carpetbaggers so we don’t shop in Lexington – might get the point across, but who knows? These people are blind to anything but their ideology.
  • I’m thinking about massive, massive “pilgrimages” to pay respects to Lee and Jackson maybe four times a year; and I mean huge crowds — who don’t spend one red cent in the city.
  • You should also advocate that others join in this boycott of that city too.
    I for one know I never intend to go there…except maybe for Lee/Jackson Day, and even then NOT ONE DOLLAR of my money is going to Miss Elrod’s coffers or those of the trash that put her in high office.
  • Amen!! I’ll stand with ya’ll…locked and loaded too…Lees do not start fights (unless they need to be started…LOL), but we sure as heck give the fight all we got!! John is right (see prayer below)…satan works to discourage God’s people…the closer to God our hearts, the harder we will be attacked…so, I say, BRING IT…I am a Daughter of the South and a soldier in God’s Army…and I do NOT back down ;o)
  • Our Father, Thank you for another day in which we can serve you! Thank you for strength to stand tall for truth! Thank you for such a great salvation that purchases for each one that trusts you as Lord and Savior, a home in heaven – with you – for eternity! Help us, I pray, to realize that Satan’s tactics never really change. While he might use closed minds and brute force to seemingly get his way, the light of truth cannot be extinguished through his tactics. May we be reminded that on the day that it appeared to the world that he had won, that you brought about your greatest victory by revealing your redemptive purpose by rising from the grave 3 days later! Thank you for being the champion of TRUTH!
  • Well, I sure am glad I have been to see Gen Lee’s final resting place there because i will never go back to that hsitoric city anymore. I guess with all the discrimination us Southerners have to endure we now have to endure the loss of our First Ammendment right.

Oh, what a complex web of Civil War memory we weave.

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14 comments… add one
  • Scott MacKenzie Sep 3, 2011 @ 3:25

    Their boycott plan sounds strangely familiar. Was it not used in Montgomery, Greensboro, Nashville and other places in the 1950s and 60s to bring about legal changes? If memory serves, the whole country – not just the South – felt the effects of people using their purchasing power. Oh, cruel irony!

    • Brooks Simpson Sep 3, 2011 @ 6:25

      Somehow I’d never confuse the struggle for basic civil rights against centuries of racism and oppression with a city ordinance concerning what could be displayed on city property for a few days in January. But maybe that’s just me.

  • Dudley Bokoski Sep 3, 2011 @ 3:16

    The original article points out the city will no longer put up the flags of the two colleges in town. While that display wouldn’t be controversial, I suppose the thinking was if you let any other flags be put up then the proponents of the Confederate flags being displayed during Lee-Jackson day would have a complaint. And if you allowed the Confederate flags up, someone might complain about that. So, the town did what towns all over the country do in this age of litigation and grievance, they covered themselves with an ordinance which effectively means nobody (and everybody) will have a complaint.

    I suspect Lexington wasn’t trying to make any kind of statement about the Confederate flag. They were just doing what cities in these circumstances do, which was to try and regulate away a situation so they wouldn’t end up in court spending town resources over a fight that wasn’t of their making. So you end up with no flags flown for W&L or VMI, which is pure silliness, and overheated debates between groups on both sides who can’t stop for ten minutes to listen to each other.

    • Kevin Levin Sep 3, 2011 @ 3:23

      You are absolutely right. The SCV folks chose to turn this into a referendum on the Confederate flag. At least one nut job is now calling for the removal of Jackson and Lee from their burial sites.

      • Robert Moore Sep 4, 2011 @ 13:41

        “The SCV folks chose to turn this into a referendum on the Confederate flag. At least one nut job is now calling for the removal of Jackson and Lee from their burial sites.”

        They turned it into more of a circus by including HKE in the mix. Anyone who can’t read through that silliness needs to do a brain check.

        As for the removal of Lee and Jackson from their graves… go ahead. Even after the removal, people are still free to put Confederate flags on the empty graves. 🙂

  • Connie Chastain Sep 2, 2011 @ 11:47

    Lexington is not the South. The South extends from the Atlantic to Texas, from the Gulf of Mexico to Kentucky. Lexington is a speck in that large territory. It’s in the South, but it isn’t THE South. And thanks to the outsiders coming in and amputating the city from its history and heritage, it isn’t even very Southern anymore.

    • Kevin Levin Sep 2, 2011 @ 11:54

      Hey Everyone,

      I just had to let this one through since it is such a doozy.

      Notice how disrespectful southerners can be to fellow southerners. I guess it’s nice to be in a position to decide who falls under the umbrella and who doesn’t. Way to go, Connie. You’ve brought this whole non-issue to a new level of absurdity.

      I trust that I will be awarded with a blog post. You’ve spent way too much time with that Brooks Simpson character. The guy is a harmless academic hack in Arizona, who has built a career writing about that boozer, Ulysses S. Grant. I thought we had something special.

      • Brooks D. Simpson Sep 2, 2011 @ 20:28

        Well, here’s your obsessed fan today:

        “The people who hate our heritage and wish to evilize Southern white people (to justify the unjustifiable brutality done to them during the war and for generations afterward) label the entire thing as racist. Thus anyone who honors it honors racism, which makes them a racist. That’s the underlying motive behind blogs like Kevin Levin’s.”

        And that’s for starters.

        I’ll take my CC (Sabathia), and you can have yours. 🙂

        • Kevin Levin Sep 3, 2011 @ 1:41

          Now that’s more like it. I knew we could work it out and I even got my own custom CC graphic.

          Do me a favor, Simpson, and find your own crazed fans. 🙂

          • Brooks Simpson Sep 3, 2011 @ 6:27

            Hey … I believe in sharing. I even gave you Karl. 🙂

            • Kevin Levin Sep 3, 2011 @ 11:18

              Karl doesn’t do it for me. 🙂

    • Lyle Smith Sep 2, 2011 @ 15:14

      Connie I’m a white southerner from Louisiana now living in Texas and don’t really have a problem with the Lexington ordinance. Now I don’t really see why the ordinance was needed, because the city can put whatever flags up it wants to or not… but it’s not unconstitutional.

      Like Andy Hall has been saying over the last two posts the ordinance doesn’t enfringe on anyone’s ability to display or celebrate the Confederate battle flag. If you want to walk up and down the streets of Lexington, VA waving the Confederate battle flag you can. So I don’t see a problem here.

  • Andy Hall Sep 2, 2011 @ 10:36

    The vitriol should not be surprising, given the way the proposed ordinance was described to heritage groups. From the online petition:

    A new proposal, being considered by the City Council, would only allow for City, State and American flags to fly on flagpoles in Lexington, Virginia, the beautiful Virginia town that is the final resting place of Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, CSA.

    Well, no, the ordinance doesn’t apply to “flagpoles in Lexington;” it applies only to flagstaffs on city-owned light poles — i.e., on public fixtures — that in the past have been displayed only for a few days each January. That’s a critical distinction, but one that’s been entirely (and I believe, intentionally) elided by opponents of the ordinance in the shouting.

    • Kevin Levin Sep 2, 2011 @ 10:43

      Thanks for the clarification, Andy. Even I need to tighten up my language, but I did note that they were public fixtures.

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