GOVERNOR TO CALL FOR CONTROVERSIAL BANNER TO COME DOWN

|| By FITSNEWS || S.C. governor Nikki Haley will call on the S.C. General Assembly to remove the Confederate flag from the north lawn of the S.C. State House in downtown Columbia, S.C., sources familiar with her plans tell FITS.

Haley has scheduled a press conference for 4:00 p.m. EDT in the second floor lobby of the State House – between the S.C. House and State Senate chambers. Prior to that, she will meet at 1:00 p.m. EDT with S.C. Speaker of the House Jay Lucas and Senate president Hugh Leatherman to inform them of her plans.

It’s unclear whether Haley will embrace calls for the flag’s immediate removal – or argue that the it should be debated when the legislature formally reconvenes next January. Legislation has already been proposed by S.C. Reps. Doug Brannon and Todd Rutherford to move the flag – but that bill cannot be filed until December of this year (or debated until the following month).

Calls for the flag to be removed have reached a deafening volume in the aftermath of the “Holy City Massacre” – in which 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof murdered nine black parishioners at the historic Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C.

Unfortunately, there has been zero appetite on the part of legislature to address the flag.

During her reelection campaign last year, Haley rebuffed efforts to remove the flag. Prior to that, she had previously gone on record supporting the flag’s presence on the State House grounds.

Of course no one is going to attack her for flip-flopping on this issue in light of what happened in Charleston …

As noted, this website has never been antagonistic toward the flag. Hell, we’ve never really had much in the way of an opinion about it.

“State leaders can leave it, move it, burn it or use it as a bath towel for all we care,” we wrote back in 2011.

In fact as recently as March of this year we were blasting the NAACP for their continued singular focus on taking it down.

But things change … seismically. Violently.

Whatever people think the Confederate flag stands for, perception is reality – and the reality is it’s being used as the calling card for a dangerous, deadly new strain of racism, one intent on depriving black Americans of the most fundamental liberty of all: The right to a beating heart.

Hoisted by the state in 1962 as a rebuke of the civil rights movement, there is simply no compelling reason to leave this banner in place – and its removal imposes no hardship upon anyone’s freedom. In fact those who support Southern heritage should remember the Confederate generals they worship surrendered these very flags at Appomattox in 1865.

Lawmakers should take the Confederate flag down. Now.

Pic: Travis Bell Photography