Southern Slavery, Flags and Priorities

Confederate flags are coming down in several states this week.

In the same time, a white supremacist has managed to get over 5000 blacks killed since the Charleston shooting last week, Doug Wilson says.

"Since the shooting in Charleston last week, approximately 15,000 children have lost their lives in this country; legally, according to the nine black-robed Nazgul; safely, at least if you don’t count the baby; but scarcely rarely. Blacks make up about thirteen percent of the general population, and yet are represented in about 35 percent of the abortions. That is disproportionate enough to lean genocidal, and to make it the actual legacy of the very white bones of Margaret Sanger. That means 5,250 of these children, slaughtered legally since last Wednesday, were black. Who speaks for them? I don’t count because I have a picture of Stonewall Jackson in my office."

I disagree with Wilson's larger point, that the confederate flag shouldn't have to come down just because people are offended, though.  He's misreading the moment.  The flag is identified generally with racism, because the Confederacy itself was inherently racist.  This isn't just the abuse of a neutral symbol.  Steven Wedgeworth helps, on this point.

"The Confederacy really was distinguished by its commitment to slavery. The concept of states rights was certainly relevant to the conversation, but this was never merely an abstract interest in anti-federalism but rather a commitment to preserve the right for states to possess slaves."

So when you're wrong about two things as a culture (abortion and celebrating a symbol that's generally considered racist), should we criticize or celebrate when the culture fixes one of those things, thus becoming inconsistent?  I say it's progress, not a reason to lambast.  But like Wilson, I want to demonize abortion, not the Confederate flag.  Are we free to speak in this country, yet, as individuals?  We must protect first amendment rights for those with whom we strongly disagree, like white supremacists.  But let's not fly their flag over capitols and on license plates with government endorsement.

Wilson's piece is a strong pro-life statement, which I applaud.

"if you were going to be conceived as the child of black parents in North America, would you prefer Charleston in 1850 or Chicago in 2015? I know which one involves a certified nurse counting up all your pieces so that they can make sure they throw all of you away."

Yes - great rhetoric and also true.  But I do think he is changing the subject, trying to connect to the Charleston shooting.  Abortion is not today a racially motivated enterprise, as far as I know.  Certainly the mother taking each life is not doing so because it hates that race, whatever ghoulish motivations Planned Parenthood had or has for society.

It's a bad idea for Wilson to try to show the horror of abortion by comparing to and downplaying Southern slavery and racism.  Why not simply point out and connect the atrociousness of both?

But it's the piling on with the demonizers that unsettles Wilson, and I'd agree.  This is hard to communicate effectively without being seen as defending the shooter, honestly, and I'm not sure it's worth Wilson's effort.  But we're becoming a French Revolution mob, sending to the guillotine anything or anyone who goes against What Everybody Knows.  It's a disturbing trend, when biblical truth no longer defines What Everybody Knows.  Just ask the Christian cake bakers these days.

So keep your priorities straight.  Don't demonize someone who loves their Southern heritage and history but repents of the racism, while you diminish the decapitations and destruction going on in your home town this week, under the American flag.

"The kind of Christian leader who gets worked up over a decal on a pick-up truck belonging to the sort of good old boy who spends half of every paycheck at Cabela’s, but who has no visceral reaction whatever to that big Planned Parenthood logo which he drives by every day, where today’s horrors are actually being perpetrated, is not, apart from repentance, going to be part of the reformation we so desperately need."