Monday letters: Confederate flag didn’t suddenly become obscene

The day after the Charleston church shooting, the Supreme Court determined that a state’s license plates are government speech; to avoid the suggestion of government endorsement, Texas may opt not to allow a Confederate flag on its plates.

A battle flag was first raised at our State House in the 1960s as a thinly veiled affront to the civil rights movement. For far longer than our leaders have expressed their newfound convictions, our government has been making a very different statement.

For years, citizens and leaders have called for the Confederate flag to be removed from the State House grounds and preserved in glass along with the pitted iron of slave shackle. Flying it is a protected individual right, but it has always been an indefensible government choice.

Let us not pretend that the flag was any less obscene before June 17. It took the murder of nine people to make politically feasible the removal from the State House grounds of a universally recognizable symbol of slavery and the white supremacist heyday of the ’50s and ’60s. We must reflect on why so much pain was required for us to hear the pleas of black South Carolinians for an acknowledgment of reality and a simple gesture of empathy.

While we’re at it, we should consider our own Sons of Confederate Veterans license plates.

And most importantly, let’s keep listening.

St. Stephen