Josh Moon

Montgomery Advertiser

The people who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War were doing so to preserve a way of life, and it had nothing to do with race.

That’s what Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill said recently, as he attempted to explain to al.com remarks he made as the keynote speaker at a Confederate Memorial Day event in Montgomery. During that event, Merrill bemoaned the removal of the Confederate flags from the state capitol building grounds.

“Are you going to take a bulldozer to the monument and forget what people fought for to preserve a way of life that makes us special and unique?” Merrill asked during the event.

And of course, he also blamed “the liberal mainstream” for not understanding “our Southern heritage” and not being interested in “what truly motivates us to be different and special.”

This, of course, is nonsense.

The whitewashing of the South’s reasons for fighting the Civil War has been going on for decades now, starting just moments after the war ended. It is meant to portray the South as merely fighting off the overbearing North in a struggle for the preservation of states’ rights.

Used as pawns in this ignorant argument are the slave-less land owners and farmers who took up arms to fight for the South. Merrill didn’t miss the chance to bring them up, either, citing them as proof the South wasn’t motivated by race but a desire to preserve a way of life – a way of life people in this region still value.

That is true enough.

The problem is that way of life is one based in ignorance, discrimination and meanness.

It’s a way of life that has benefited the few at the top while forever keeping others – white and black – chained to the lower classes.

And like those slaveless Confederate soldiers, so many Southern citizens continue to be suckered into fighting for the cause of their own entrapment. The tactics are much the same – driven by race and the Bible and a false sense of pride in doing things uniquely Southern.

They play on prejudices and a human nature to be wary or more likely to distrust anyone who looks, acts or thinks differently. And it started here from the very beginning.

“Our new government’s … foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition,” said Confederate States vice president Alexander H. Stephens in his infamous cornerstone speech in 1861. “This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.

Ah, the “natural” argument – it’s like a discrimination catch-all. Good for enslaving people and for implementing discriminatory bathroom laws.

This ridiculous “way of life” that some seem so adamant to protect has kept the South, and Alabama in particular, in a perpetual state of poverty and distress.

We cut social programs because the money goes to menthol cigarettes and Obama phones. We underfund schools because our property taxes were set in a time when implementing proper rates would mean providing a quality education to black children too. Same for our income tax structure. We have refused Medicaid expansion in the face of undeniable benefits to every citizen in this state primarily because it is a program attached to a black president, who has been turned into a super villain. We lose business opportunities because of nonsensical resistance to same-sex marriage or an irrational fear of public restroom issues.

We have fought to prevent scared refugee children from being housed at our military bases. We have pushed back against refugees fleeing terrorists being allowed to live in our state. We have chased away immigrant workers with embarrassing immigration laws that included questioning children who were attempting to enroll in schools.

And because of this way of life, as even our own embattled governor admits, Alabama is last in most things good and first in most things bad.

And that, after so many decades of intolerance, irrational fear and discrimination, is the true Southern lifestyle.

If Alabama, and the South, ever hopes to move ahead, it would best to let it die.

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