Should The Conferdate Flag Be Banned Entirely?

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I don't mean a referendum regarding private use, rather for state use.

No icon should ever be banned from private use, no matter if 99% of people are for it.

Of course; private citizens should be able to display or say anything they like. But when it comes to government property, that's a different story.

Which side are we going to err on, free speech or censorship? It's next to a monument after all, specifically for Confederate soldiers. Unless it can be established that it incites harm, for example sedition, there is no legal precedent whatsoever for taking it down.

This is calling for renaming, Five Flags Over Texas. Don't Mess With Texas.

The American flag of the era, and all versions, had flown over slavery for seventy-five years.

Washington DC, the Capital, the White House, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, were all built by slave labor, who felled the trees, hand sawed the planks, made and fired the bricks. The US Government was a very large contractor of slave labor. Bridges, docks, shipyards, roads, were all slave crews.

Slaves cost money. When the Irish Potato Famine hit, shiploads of Irish could be had for the shipping. They had some background on spinning thread and weaving cloth, and if kept drunk could be worked to death. If the south had set up spinning and weaving, they would gain the whole industry.

From the Trail of Tears to the war was only fifteen years, when land was cleared, cultivated, planted, and cotton became a big export.

Irish powered free labor lead to the war. For the next fifty years children as young as six were worked in the mills for twelve hours a day six days a week.

Is this your victory over the farmers who produced the cotton?

Free the Blacks, enslave the children!

CBC: Confederate flag controversy: Nikki Haley, South Carolina governor, calls for removal of flag

That's a tough one for me. I know people like to fly it as a symbol of southern pride, and I'm fine with that, but there is the historical meaning behind it that makes you wonder. Still, I don't think most people who fly it nowadays do so in support of racism.

Banning the Confederate Flag, like any other symbol, is just a stupid idea, as it is an infringement on free speech, and I don't believe that displaying it hurts anyone.

If the Confederate Flag is banned, what does it mean for Dukes of Hazzard reruns?

I think the whole debate is really ridiculous. Americans in a nutshell, everyone.

As I said, anyone can privately fly the Confederate flag - there are Neo-Nazis who fly the Swastika, and no one is using the force of government to take it down. It's just a matter that many Americans happen to find the symbol of the stars and bars - or rather, what it represents - to be offensive when flying atop a government building. Especially African Americans, who associated it with the racism and violence directed at them for generations.
The historian Shelby Foote - himself a white southerner - said something to the extent of: "We lost the right to wave the Confederate flag when it had been used by the KKK, and we said nothing."

Obviously, the episodes would still be broadcast, but only after they had been scrubbed of anything prohibited by law (like the music tracks within Northern Exposure episodes after it was learned that, except for the first season, the producers never sought nor received home-video rights to use the music, OOPS! On the series' DVDs, actors wander wistfully saying very little to each other while royalty-free generic elevator music is played instead of the characteristic music that made the series popular.).

When fate blesses us with no more Dukes of Hazzard, it damns us with no more Northern Exposure.

My Lord, I never knew that about Northern Exposure!

Never fear - till it's revealed that the Duke boys were actually government agents, posing as rednecks, trying to bust Boss Hogg and his corrupt, inept police force, I think the General Lee will go untouched.

Yep, it is kinda creepy, really. Like an Alaskan version of The Twilight Zone.

What about the fact that slavery existed much longer under the flag of the United States? Singling out the Confederate flag to me seems like an attempt to pawn off a dark aspect of our nation's history as some vanquished foreign apparition when its apart of all our history. I get that its a symbol to rally against and if people want to take it down then that's their choice, I don't see any reason for it to banned.

Same.