Sunday, November 21, 2010

Southern Republicans & The Curse of Ham

From The Arkansas Times:

[T]here are Republicans and there is Republican Loy Mauch, elected to represent House District 26 near Hot Springs. A former head of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans post in Hot Springs, Mauch calls the Confederate flag "a symbol of Jesus Christ," and is a current member of The League of the South, a group which works toward the formation of an independent Southern nation.

Kinda weird that the "party of Lincoln" is the new bastion for southern separatist loons who still want a civil war rematch. Sad too that this kind of nonsense must resonate well with some useful niche of the hillbilly vote. So let's state the damned obvious just in case anyone still gives a sh*t: the Stars n' Bars does not represent Jesus Christ, it represents a socio-economic and political system that was based on and defined by f*cking slavery.

The Civil War had slavery running all through it. Even though Lincoln was pretty lukewarm on the issue and his overarching goal was simply to save the union, the North fought like hell to crush it. That war was won, the Union was saved,  slavery sucked so STFU.

So what exactly is it about the confederacy that inspires revanchist rednecks like Mauch to keep trying to breathe life into its rotted corpse? Is it the Confederacy's vicious racism he appreciates? Or is it the Confederacy's vicious pro-rich 'classism', the way it perverted the electoral process to create a dictatorship of the wealthy based on block votes of human beings 'owned'? For a modern GOP'er, I can see how both would be attractive. But maybe it's a more fundamental, darker thing...

Any way you look at it, that flag sure as hell has nothing to do with Jesus Christ. Only if your Jesus Christ vindicates your belief in the "Curse of Ham" - that racist reading of the Book of Genesis that a**holes throughout the centuries have used as a justification for slavery and racism. Black people were damned by God, so you could treat them like sh*t and still be a good Christian. Heck, it worked in the 1800s... maybe Mauch figures it'll still work today?

Scary to wonder if this white power, biblical dog whistle really still works on conservative Arkansans... Is this the real message being sent whenever some vote-sucking blowhard like Mauch conflates Christianity and the confederacy? If so, we have a long, long ways to go as a people.

Share/Save/Bookmark

1 comment:

  1. Lee, Jefferson and all those confederate fucks should have been shot. They were the worse traitors ever. Treason had no consequences for the south.
    All things confederate should have been outlawed and marshall law declared for many year. The African-Americans should have been integrated into American society according to Lincoln's plan.
    Instead they all walked and continued to talk their treason. Jim Crow took over after they moved out the freedmen's bureau. Today we have a rats nest of confederate flag waving, black hating, rednecks and uneducated, backwoods morons just as treasonous as their g'fathers.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.