The Georgia legislature meets for only a few frantic weeks a year, after which these part-time lawmakers return to their day jobs. What's astonishing is their ability to pack so much national embarrassment into such a brief legislative session.
State Representative Tommy Benton (Republican), whose Georgia legislature web page describes him as a retired history teacher as well as a "life member of the National Rifle Association and the Sons of Confederate Veterans" while remaining "active in the Military Order of the Stars and Bars." One organization he never found time for, despite graduating high school in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War, was the United States military.
Honoring our Confederate ancestors since 1938
In case you're wondering, the Military Order of the Stars and Bars, according to their web page, "was founded in 1938 to honor the Confederate Officer Corps and the government officials of the Confederacy. Our members are all lineal or collateral descendants from these two groups… We are loyal Americans whose mission is to honor our ancestors and our Southern heritage."
Visit their web page and you will see a picture of the founder of the KKK, Nathan Bedford Forrest, staring out at you as if intent on burning a cross on your lawn with Jefferson Davis, the Confederate States of America, arrested a few hours south of Atlanta.
But I digress.
Tommy Benton (yes, that is his legal name, just as Georgia politicians Johnny Isaacson and Newt Gingrich bear the name of their birth certificates) won his election to the Georgia State House with 100% of the vote. It would have been embarrassing if he didn't since he ran unopposed.
Several days ago, he introduced House Resolution 644 to recognize April as Confederate History Month and rename April 26 Confederate Memorial Day. It's apparently not the confederacy you might have read about in history books, though, because nowhere in the resolution is slavery or the Civil War mentioned.
No, this confederacy was engaged in a noble but lost cause, a "four-year struggle for state's rights, individual freedom, and local government control."
No, this confederacy was engaged in a noble but lost cause, a "four-year struggle for state's rights, individual freedom, and local government control."
That last point, sadly enough, is true. It was only last year that our governor removed Confederate Memorial Day from the official state holiday calendar. We still have a holiday but politely call it "state holiday."
Before you write off Benton's resolution as an attention-getting stunt by a bored white guy from a comfortably safe Georgia rural county, please take note that at least 3 of his colleagues agree with the need to honor the West's only explicitly white supremacist nation and are willing to co-sponsor it (Reps. Alan Powell, Steve Tarvin, and Jesse Petrea).
The idea of honoring the struggle for the right to own black men, women, and children has for some reason drawn condemnation from the Georgia NAACP as well as members of the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus.
Benton apparently likes stirring the pot. Last year he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the Ku Klux Klan "made a lot of people straighten up." Perhaps he was misunderstood - perhaps he wasn't referring to people but the hairs on the back of their necks because I know mine stand on end when I think about cross-burnings and lynching.
The backlash he created stunned the good legislator. Ah, shucks, he was just trying to honor his Southern heritage. Do you know who the real perpetrator is here? That's right, the Lame Street Media. "The media has seemed to go out of its way to try and make this something that it's not," Benton said. "We are not creating anything that's not already in code. Confederate Memorial Day has been celebrated since 1874."The doctrine of states' rights has an ugly history down here. States' rights in the American south almost always means one thing: the right of white Americans to deprive black Americans of their rights. Before 1865, states' rights meant the right to own slaves; since then, it's meant the right to enforce Jim Crow and segregation. Ask a white southerner to name the most egregious example of federal overreach in all of its dastardly forms - including rightwing talking points about judicial activists legislating from the bench - and you'll inevitably get to Brown v the Board of Education, the landmark 1954 ruling striking down separate but equal and beginning the long, painfully slow march toward racial integration. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 met fierce, often violent resistance among southern whites who - once again - raised the hallowed-sounding notion of states' rights in their brutal campaign against the civil rights movement. They took federal courts backed sometimes by federal troops to enforce. It was no coincidence that the white people forming ugly crowds to prevent black children from attending "their" schools flew the Confederate flag whose ideals Benton now wants us in Georgia to honor.
I'm always curious as to why Republicans clamor so much about states' rights when it comes to slavery or the right to keep blacks out of white schools but belong to a party that believes the federal government should override state and local governments on all matters from public safety (they want to force all states to honor concealed gun licenses issued by the weakest) to environmental protection (they want to ban California from setting stricter emissions standards than the EPA) to immigration (punishing states and cities that believe that enforcement of immigration laws is a federal rather than a state and local responsibility). If there is a theme of respect for state and local governments in Republican behavior and policy, I fail to see it.
Put me in the camp of those who say that any right that involves depriving other Americans of rights is no right at all.
This weekend while walking through historic downtown Decatur, I was once again struck by the enormous obelisk with CSA 1861-1865 engraved at its base. Why is it still there, in the same grassy square where open air concerts will soon be held to Americans of all ethnic groups and regional origin? Perhaps I am the only person to actually read the grandiose, self-serving nonsense about the brave men fighting for what they thought was right on four sides of the memorial, but such an anti-American monstrosity has no place in my town.
But instead of tearing it down, or rededicating it to the victims of the transatlantic slave trade or the American holocaust of slavery or the century of civil rights workers, many of whom gave their lives just to be treated like human beings, some Georgians insist the Confederacy, the defunct white supremacist failed state that caused so much misery and suffering, needs more honoring, not less.
The Confederate States of America is a failed experiment in explicit white supremacism. Had it survived, had it not mellowed out and abolished the peculiar institution that prompted its formation, slavery would be as mindlessly and fiercely defended by southern whites as they now defend their related second amendment rights, broadened from their original intent to form a militia to suppress slave uprisings and hunt down fugitive slaves to stockpile weapons of war in your truck.
How sad that 152 years after Georgia rejoined the United States of America following the failure of that grand slave-owning insurgency, there are some among us who would like to glorify and honor what was once the greatest existentialist threat to our country.
A Confederate Memorial Day with no mention of slavery would be like having a Third Reich Memorial day without mentioning the camps or the Holocaust. Separating the cause of the Civil War - slavery - from the war itself is like trying to separate white from rice. It simply can't be done.
If you are a white supremacist take pride in the Lost Cause mythology and think that there was something noble in the human catastrophe of the civil war, you have the right to do so in the privacy of your own home. Hell, you can even fly your traitor flag from the back of your truck. No one is going to stop you apparently.
But don't ask the rest of us to set aside a day to sanctify your misunderstanding of history and your obliviousness to the suffering of the 20% of Americans who at the time of our country's founding were in bondage.
If we do have a holiday, let's dedicate it to the spirit of unity that allowed Southerners finally to lay down their arms and admit they had been beaten, stopping the carnage they began 4 years earlier. At a time when all Americans use the authority of the Constitution as the final authority to support their argument, even if they interpret it differently, let's not forget that there was a time when men throughout the south so hated that document and the government it authorized that they rose up in violent and bloody revolt, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans in the process.
We should never let that happen again. Perhaps we could use a day each year to re-commit ourselves to never becoming so divided that words and sectional differences explode into actual bloodshed.
Maybe that would be the most fitting tribute to the Civil War.
