Politically Correct Discrimination in the Twenty-First Century

Steve Parrish, a 30-year veteran of the Dothan (AL) Police Dept., was elected to be the town's chief of police by a 6-1 vote of the city council last April. A revelation about Chief Parrish's past, however, now has some local citizens calling for his resignation. What is this deep, dark secret from the Chief's past, you might be wondering. The reason Chief Parrish's job is being threatened is simply because he's a descendant of a Confederate veteran and is publicly proud of that fact!

Several kook websites & blogs have picked up on the story, and they play up the notion that the SCV is a 'neo-confederate' organization, but what does that actually mean? One loose definition for the term 'neo-confederate' is "a term describing groups and individuals who portray the Confederate States of America and its actions in the American Civil War in a positive light" (Wikipedia); another definition is given by the Southern Poverty Law Center (a pseudo-civil-rights organization) as being "twentieth and twenty-first century revivals of pro-Confederate sentiment in the United States." These loose definitions are extremely vague, however, and leave much to be assumed by the reader or insinuated by the author of the story as to what "pro-Confederate sentiment" is and what it means to "portray the Confederate States of America and its actions in the American Civil War in a positive light."

Due to the high level of misinformation and historical revisionism about the Confederacy in the media and academia, the label of 'neo-confederate' often gets used to promulgate the idea that members of groups given that label desire the return of chattel slavery and/or support the overthrow/destruction of the U.S. government. As any member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans knows, this is absolutely not the case, and wasn't even true of the Confederacy when it existed. The widespread acceptance, however, of such misinformation is precisely why it is completely acceptable among politically correct institutions to discriminate against Southerners who are proud of their heritage and active in honoring it.

This is not entirely new news to most of us who are willing to publicly display the flags of our ancestors and stand up in defense of their good name and The Cause for which they fought. We know that this Cause was not slavery or the destruction of the U.S. gov't, as so many are being misguided to believe, but was the cause of independence, self-determination, limited government "of, for, and by the people," and the right of sovereign states to shake off the bonds of tyranny and determine their own course. In all truth, there is absolutely no ideological difference between being proud of one's Confederate ancestry and being proud of a heritage that connects to a Patriot soldier of the Revolutionary War, as the Patriot and the Confederate fought for the exact same things.

How is it, then, that such blatant discrimination can be so acceptable in 21st-century American society? When will the movement of equal rights extend to include Southerners who are proud of their Confederate heritage? As the headlines in the first days of this calendar year will attest, that day is nowhere in sight.

In times like this I am reminded of something that was said at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Encouraging solidarity between all of the signers, Ben Franklin is reported to have told his fellow patriots, "We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." Let us stand tall and proud, my fellow Compatriots! Stand tall and proud TOGETHER!

DEO VINDICE
- Jonathan McCleese
Sergeant-at-Arms, SCV Camp #1321