I’ve lived in northeast Georgia all of my life.  My congressional district is the Georgia ninth.  According to the Cook Partisan Voting Index, my district is the third most conservative in the nation.  I’m nearly 46 years old, and the northeast part of Georgia has been very conservative for a long time.  Of course, I would have it no other way.

That being said, I’ve never been much of a fan of the Confederate battle flag.  I’ve never purchased an item – t-shirt, bumper sticker, car tag, and so on – emblazoned with the flag.  And as far as I can remember, I’ve never displayed it at any time or at any place on my personal property.

I recall once during my later teenage years, or perhaps my early twenties, while an undergraduate student, and while working on the landscaping crew at an upscale area golf course, I vocally expressed my disdain for the Confederate battle flag.  It was not unusual to see pickup trucks around my small town cruising around with the flag proudly and often sizably displayed. I saw such actions as rather foolishly “redneckish” and said so. From that day on, my fellow landscapers affectionately dubbed me as “Reb.”

Though I’ve grown to embrace much of my “redneck” heritage, the Confederate battle flag is a symbol that I still largely reject.  It doesn’t offend me when I see it, and I don’t immediately label those who choose to display it as “racists.”  However, I know enough history, and I’ve seen enough real racism, to understand what the flag means to those who see it as a symbol of such.

Make no mistake about it: as author and Christian apologist Jim Denison recently pointed out, “[i]t is a fact of Civil War history that the flag was originally associated with the institution of chattel slavery.  And it is a fact of recent history that the flag continues to signify racism for many.”  Denison cites James M. Coski, the historian at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia and an author of a “definitive work on the Confederate flag.”

As Denison’s piece notes, “[a]ccording to Coski, ‘African-American slavery was inextricably intertwined with white southerners’ defense of their own constitutional liberties and with nearly every other facet of southern life.’  He concludes: ‘Descendants of the Confederates are not wrong to believe that the flag symbolized defense of constitutional liberties and resistance to invasion by military forces determined to crush an experiment in nationhood.  But they are wrong to believe that this interpretation of the flag's meaning can be separated from the defense of slavery.’”

And as historian David Barton notes, it is revisionist history to conclude that the South did not go to war over slavery.  He concludes that “the South’s desire to preserve slavery was indisputably the driving reason for the formation of the Confederacy.”  (The link is well worth the read.)

Nevertheless, as Selwyn Duke has already deftly informed us, Dylann Roof’s wicked acts should have nothing to do with whether or not an individual, a business, or a municipality decides to display, peddle, or hoist the Confederate flag.  The reasons for making such a decision have been around for decades.  To all of a sudden decide now to cast the Confederate battle flag upon the trash heap of history is to submit to the liberal mob.  And submitting to a liberal mob only creates more incentive for the next mob action.

As Ann Coulter has gone into great detail about, whether myth-making (“this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries”), contradictory thinking (“Muslims don’t need to apologize for the Tsarnaevs.” – “White America must answer for the Charleston church massacre.”) creating messiahs, turning those who disagree with you into opponents, simple-mindedness, inability to grasp logic, or speaking in slogans (“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!”), the liberal mob is always on the lookout for the next opportunity to further its agenda.

Because liberalism generally rejects the notion of absolute truth, and because with liberalism it’s always about “the narrative,” the next opportunity could be almost anything: the ten-dollar bill, the Jefferson Memorial, the use of “boys and girls,” the use of “wife,” and so on.  Who knows where it will stop?  Will we get another redefinition of marriage?  Another redefinition of gender (along with another letter in the absurd LGBTQQIAP lexicon)?  Will the American flag soon be a target?

As I’ve noted before, because their moral bar is so low and easily adjusted to whatever is politically popular, liberals today generally have an easier time “playing politics” than conservatives – especially Christian conservatives.  In the not so distant past, many liberals had little problem embracing the Confederacy, along with its symbols, as long as it was a useful means to a political end.  As has been well-documented now, the Confederate battle flag is the legacy of Democrats, not Republicans.

This is not about Democrats and Republicans.  This is about what is right and wrong.  And relativists who operate by mob rule simply cannot be trusted with such.

Trevor Grant Thomas, at the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.  www.trevorgrantthomas.com.  Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World. tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com.