XPost: misc.immigration.usa, alt.california.illegals, alt.politics.elections   
   XPost: ca.politics   
   From: philmore@aol.com   
      
   Ignorant people should not be teaching in schools.  Brother   
   Cregan should be fired for ignorance.   
      
   If the Confederate flag is inarguably a hate symbol, as a Long   
   Island Catholic school principal suggested on Wednesday, does   
   that make Mississippi a hotbed of racial animosity, since the   
   rebel battle flag still flies above the capitol dome in Jackson?   
      
   Brother Gary Cregan, the principal of St. Anthony’s High School   
   in South Huntington, N.Y., defended his decision to expel two   
   students for bringing the rebel flag to school. He said he finds   
   it “just very hard to imagine why any student in 2014 would even   
   consider or think that a Confederate flag would be anything   
   other than a symbol of hate.”   
      
   But here in the South – and other, mostly rural places around   
   the United States where the flag can still be found, often in   
   the front yards of mobile homes – that assessment may be   
   overconfident. Aside from still gracing the Mississippi state   
   flag, the Southern Cross flies large along a Florida interstate,   
   and there’s another one fluttering on the South Carolina capitol   
   grounds.   
      
   Also, as of February, Georgians can pay $80 to get a special   
   license plate with the rebel flag stamped on it, in honor of the   
   Sons of Confederate Veterans, a heritage group.   
      
   To be sure, the Long Island expulsions are making news more   
   because of the motives of the students, as well as the free-   
   speech implications at the school. Two other students at the   
   same school were expelled for posting blackface pictures on   
   social media, and the principal is clearly grappling with what   
   he has deemed troubling attitudes on his campus.   
      
   But the expulsions and Brother Gary’s comments also underscore a   
   truism in the long-simmering cultural tensions between North and   
   South – the idea in the North that the argument over the   
   Confederate flag is settled and done, and the reality that in   
   the South, any final judgment on what the flag really means, and   
   how it should be flown, remains at a shaky stalemate.   
      
   For example, in contrast to the Long Island expulsions, the   
   principal of Reagan High School in Winston-Salem, N.C., last   
   year merely reprimanded a student who decided to fly the   
   Confederate flag from the school’s flagpole. The principal   
   called the act “in bad taste.”   
      
   The Confederate flag has long been a touchy symbol, and the   
   boycott battles by the National Association for the Advancement   
   of Colored People to eradicate the flag from public lands and   
   capitol domes in the late 1990s and early 2000s came largely in   
   response to the fact that Southern governors displayed the flag   
   as an act of rebellion against integration in the 1950s and ’60s.   
      
   The NAACP effort was effective enough to leave Mississippi as   
   the only state still flying the flag. In 2001, the state held a   
   referendum on a new flag featuring a 20-star canton instead of   
   the distinctive blue cross, but two-thirds of voters preferred   
   the old rebel flag motif, which dates to 1894. Thirty-four   
   percent of voters in Mississippi are black.   
      
   Part of the explanation of why the flag is far from redacted   
   even in Southern officialdom is that many Southerners choose to   
   overlook the reactions of the civil rights era and also reject   
   its use by white supremacy groups, including the Ku Klux Klan.   
      
   Matthew Papay, who was forced by the University of Rochester in   
   New York to remove a rebel flag from his dorm window last fall,   
   agreed that the flag is “used by a small percentage of people in   
   certain hate groups.” But he then noted, according to USA Today,   
   that he has “never personally met a Southerner who displayed it   
   out of hate.”   
      
   His argument for displaying the flag – that it represents a   
   unique cultural heritage and that the school prides itself on   
   diversity – ultimately didn’t fly with administrators, who told   
   him he could hang it on his wall if he wanted.   
      
   But in fact, it’s in the South, often on college campuses like   
   the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where flag debates have   
   been the most charged. School administrators must weigh the free-   
   speech rights of white Southerners against a sense of historical   
   malice toward a long-suffering minority community, many of whom   
   are direct descendants of slaves.   
      
   Just this February, someone hung a noose around the neck of a   
   statue of James Meredith, a black student who integrated Ole   
   Miss. A Confederate flag symbol was also left behind at the   
   scene.   
      
   Confederate symbols “convey an image ... and that image is an   
   image tied to the past, not a 21st-century image,” Southern   
   historian Charles Eagles, a professor at the university, told   
   The New York Times after the incident.   
      
   Some historians say the impulse – whether in the North or South   
   – to redact Confederate symbols entirely from modern life smacks   
   of historic revisionism.   
      
   Instead of on state flags, license plates, and highways, maybe   
   the rebel flag really just belongs in a museum, where its   
   context can best be construed, Keith Hardison, a state cultural   
   attaché in North Carolina, told the Winston-Salem Journal last   
   year.   
      
   In a museum setting, Mr. Hardison said, “You’re talking about   
   ... what happened during that period; it is being properly used   
   in its historic context. That’s the proper way to do it.”   
      
   http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2014/0417/Confederate-flag-   
   flap-at-N.Y.-school-why-debate-is-hardly-settled   
      
         
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)