CA Looking to Stifle Freedom of Speech - Trying to Ban "Southern Cross"

By Elizabeth Nelson

Only in Liberal California would we see a bill on Gov. Jerry Brown's desk, asking him to stifle his constituent's freedom of speech and ban the selling and displaying of objects displaying the Confederate flag, or as people in the South like to misquote and ignorantly call it, the "Rebel Flag."

A bill sits on Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk to ban California from displaying or selling the Confederate flag or objects with images of it. The state’s Legislature passed the bill nearly unanimously last week.

Assemblyman Isadore Hall III, D-Compton, introduced the legislation after his mother discovered the Capitol gift shop sold a replica of Confederate money that contained a picture of the flag, according to the L.A. Times.

The lone dissenting vote among the 67 cast was from former California GOP gubernatorial candidate Tim Donnelly of Twin Peaks. He argued the bill would infringe on free speech.

“I’m a strict Constitutionalist,” he told the Times. “It’s painful and lonely.”

Hall thanked his fellow lawmakers for “standing together united to fend off the ugly hatred of racism that’s been portrayed and demonstrated through the emblem of the Confederacy.”

The flag is, to be sure, divisive. In the South, some fly it as a nod to their roots — the “Stars and Bars” or variations of it are used as the state flag in a few states, including Alabama, Florida and Mississippi. Others use the flag as the symbol of racism that Hall, a black man, decries.

It's only "divisive in the south" because the ignorant continue to repeat the uniformed narrative that they hear other ignorant liberals tell them, instead of doing their homework regarding what this flag really means, or maybe the rumor was just started by some Northerner, gloating over the fact that they won the war.
 

So, now the battle flag that features the cross of St. Andrew - the apostle who was martyred by crucifixion on an X-shaped cross - is now the symbol of racism and hatred? I guess other countries with crosses on their flags are also bigoted and racist as well then? Or is it the fact that it's "bad people" that use it for their reasons, that yank your chain? 

I guess you will also want to ban pornography, because bad people victimize children; ban planes, because we've seen that bad people can use them in bad ways, and oh, and I'm sure you'll want to ban the American flag now, because people have taken it and altered it for their  own purposes, in ways that it was never intended.  

The Army of Northern Virginia was the first to design a flag with the cross of St. Andrew, and Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard proposed adopting a version of it as the standard battle flag of the Confederate army. One of its virtues was that, unlike the Stars and Bars, the Southern Cross was next to impossible to confuse with the Stars and Stripes in battle.  It has nothing to do with slavery, just like the war, although people are under the misconception that the war was fought to free slaves.   So, today, this has nothing to do with slavery or civil rights, but everything to do with freedom of speech.

But the First Amendment offers strong protections for such free speech. Could this law be a violation of those constitutional rights even though it doesn’t apply to individuals? “It’s complicated,” said Peter Scheer, executive director of the San Rafael, Ca.-based First Amendment Coalition.

He told Watchdog.org the law could be seen as a form of government expression, which is constitutionally protected, but on the other hand there are limits on this doctrine of government speech. Continue Reading Watchdog.org

Now here we are, learning nothing from history.  We're as stubborn as the hardheaded as the Northerners and Southerners who went to war with each other, but this time we are fighting over Battle Flags, and instead of allowing our ancestor's pasts, not even our own, to make us better, we continue to pick at our scars and watch our spirits wither away, as we allow their past to make us sour and bitter people.  Because of that, we are no longer contributing to society, making us worthless to those we love and everyone around us, and we did this to ourselves.