Their decency is not predicated on it one way or another. The point I think your missing is that your sense of morality isn't necessarily theirs.
I think you're insisting that there is no right or wrong on this issue and I don't agree. I think a decent people, decent elected leaders, do not intentionally offend a great share of their state with the flying of a damn relic of a bygone age.
No, I'm demonstrating that the idea that blacks were inferior back then was damn near universal and a position held by the very man who set them free. Thus separating the issue of slavery and "white supremecy".
But there is a gigantic difference between having some view that blacks were inferior, and allowing them their freedom versus founding a country predicated on their perpetual slavery. And what I mean by white supremacy in this context is in the eyes of the law, the state, enforced with guns and prisons for offenders.
So you can't tell the difference between an explanation and an excuse. OK.
You are "explaining" acts that I find morally reprehensible without any comment on whether those acts are or not. Let me put it this way, if you were black and on the receiving end of Jim Crow laws, do you care that they might have been instituted 70 years prior because of heavy handed Yankees during reconstruction? No, because you know in this reality they're morally reprehensible and ought to end, today.
When said "outlier" was the plaintiff in a decided case that set legal precedent here in the good ole US for the allowing of servitude for life, i.e. slavery? That that individual. that that "outlier" was black? That at that point in time, that moment right there was the exact moment that Slavery became an Institution recognized by the precursor to the US government? Again, I'm separating the issue of slavery and "white supremacy". You're focusing on the outcome, I'm showing you the beginnings.
You cannot separate racism from white supremacy. Read the people from that era, the VP of the CSA - he states the inherent inferiority of blacks as a "natural law." Or the Texas declaration. Slavery was necessarily tied directly to the inherent supremacy of the white race over blacks. It's impossible to square any other belief with the constitution or with any coherent notion of morality. How could anyone justify perpetual slavery of a fellow white man who the Constitution declares was granted inalienable rights by God? They couldn't, and so a line was drawn that declared white superiority by natural law, as ordained (literally) by God.
No, you're trying to pigeonhole me into that position. I'm explaining that racism and slavery aren't necessarily -- as has been shown -- tied at the hip. At least not originally, but let me ask you this -- what is your definition of white supremacy?
Sure they were, for all purposes that matter, at least in this country.
You are I believe lest you wouldn't be brushing aside my salient points so carelessly and parroting the same old mantra "you're defending racism and white supremacy"
Right, you're just explaining where they were coming from.
The Federal government, the North once again imposing themselves on the sovereignty of a State, forcing on them that which they do not want, telling them how to handle themselves, just like the time of pre-secession, the reason for secession -- and you think them raising that flag was just about reassuring white people that they're the best?
But the reason the Feds imposed themselves on the South does MATTER. Goodness, the system entrenched by law in the South in
1960!! was an absolute mockery to any idea of freedom and liberty that you can articulate. So I'm sorry but I really don't give one **** that the Feds were forcing something on the South that the white power structure did not want. Of course not, but it was immoral and a disgrace to this great country that we allowed such a system to persist for so long.
Goodness, it's bringing up a wife beater and you "explaining" that he only beat his wife because she didn't do as he said.
You couldn't think that the raising of the flag had anything to do with the Federal government's encroachment, once again? That the Confederate Flag was a symbol of defiance of that Federal encroachment?
Of course, but the "encroachment" was to enforce basic civil rights for 1/3 or more of South Carolina CITIZENS, entitled to the same God given rights as their white counterparts but who were for nearly a century systematically denied them by white racists at all levels of the STATE.