Huckabee's Hate Flag

Mike Huckabee, campaigning recently in South Carolina, declared that the federal government should have no opinion on decisions about state flags, claiming the matter "has no business from the president of the United States." Speaking specifically about the Confederate Flag, Huckabee said, "You don't like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell 'em what to do with the pole, that's what we'd do." In other words, our nation's leader should remain silent about a long-recognized icon of hatred and injustice.

That's moral leadership?

Despite Minister Huckabee’s Christian faith, his inability to reject the Confederate Flag sent a coded message to the Conservative base meant to suggest, “I’m a bigot like you!”

Some Southerners remain incapable of accepting the defeat of the Civil War. Visit a hundred diners in the Northeast and you will never hear mention of the Civil War. But put hidden tape recorders in a hundred diners south of the Mason Dixon Line and you will capture regular comments on the “War of Northern Aggression.”

Despite the immorality of slavery, the humiliation of the South remains a smoldering insult, and some fly the Confederate Flag to vent their anger. Rather than speak about what the flag really means to them, they claim the flag represents the lost “Southern way of life” or is a "symbol of lost heritage." But what do those phrases mean - that Southerners have lost the right to sip mint juleps? Of course not. They're euphemisms for lost slavery. Southern life revolved around the economic bounty of enslaving and the social lift of belittling kidnapped Africans.

Wealthy Southerners needed slavery to maintain their wealth. And poor white Southerners needed slavery to maintain their social status. They may have been poor, but at least they weren’t slaves. So the Emancipation Proclamation and the ensuing, bitter, devastating military defeat placed poor Southern whites on a par with people previously denigrated and looked down upon, an adjustment still apparently taking place.

For decades now, the Confederate Flag has represented injustice, racism, discrimination, segregation, lynching, intolerance and inhumanity, the apparent core values of the old “Southern way of life” and "heritage." Mike Huckabee’s coded embrace of it was a grotesque and un-Christian gesture, and reveals much about his character, or lack of it.

- JT Compton
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