Are We Going To Deny That The Confederacy Never Existed? Is The Next Step To Ban Anything Related To The South, Remove All Monuments To Confederate Generals Or End Teaching The Reasons The Civil War Was Fought?

House Votes to Ban Confederate Flag and You Won’t Believe Where

July 9, 2015 By Colleen Conley

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The House of Representatives voted on Tuesday to ban the display of Confederate flags at historic federal cemeteries in the deep South.

The move came after a brief debate on a measure funding the National Park Service, which maintains 14 national cemeteries, most of which contain graves of Civil War soldiers.

A proposal by Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., would block the Park Service from allowing private groups to decorate the graves of southern soldiers with Confederate flags in states that commemorate Confederate Memorial Day. The cemeteries affected are the Andersonville and Vicksburg cemeteries in Georgia and Mississippi.

“The American Civil War was fought, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, to ‘save the last best hope of Earth,’” Huffman said. “We can honor that history without celebrating the Confederate flag and all of the dreadful things that it symbolizes.”

The Park Service funding bill is scheduled for a vote on Thursday.

Pressure has mounted to ban display of the flag on state and federal property in the wake of last month’s tragic murders at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. The accused gunman, Dylann Roof, posed with the Confederate flag in online photos and reportedly has told authorities that he wanted to start a race war.

The South Carolina legislature has voted to remove the flag from the Capitol grounds at the behest of Governor Nikki Haley who will undoubtedly sign the bill into law.

Bennie Thompson, a black Democrat from Mississippi, to ban Confederate images such as that contained in the Mississippi flag from being displayed in the House complex. Numerous statues of Confederate figures such as Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States, are also on display in the Capitol.

The Confederate flag is a part of the history of the south, and for better or for worse, it stands for much more than slavery.  To pretend it did not exist by banning it’s very presence on the graves of those who fought under it is indicative of a nation in denial.