Lower the flag South Carolina

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

Away down South in Dixie, the Confederate flag is in the thick of battle once again.

Last week, South Carolina's Governor David Beasley plunged his state into controversy with a televised call to lower the rebel flag from above the statehouse and move it to a nearby Confederate memorial.

Four minutes after making his proposal, Beasley heard himself compared by state Senator Glenn McConnell — also on statewide television — to Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who sought to appease Adolf Hitler. Attorney General Charlie Condon called Beasley's speech "a victory for the extremist groups." He declared that those who have "criticized the Confederate flag should be ashamed of themselves."

The state where the Civil War began is the only one that still flies the Confederate flag from its seat of government. The South Carolina Legislature ordered the banner flown over the Capitol dome in March 1962, a symbol of defiance as the civil rights movement was reaching flood tide. (Officially, the flag was raised to commemorate the Civil War's centennial.) It has waved over the statehouse ever since, a revered emblem of Southern "heritage" to some, a detested reminder of oppression and bigotry to others.

South Carolina has changed since 1962. For one thing, Beasley, McConnell, and Condon are all Republicans, along with most of the state's congressional delegation and about half of the legislators in Columbia. Not too long ago, Republican officeholders were among the state's rarest fauna. The grand old man of South Carolina politics, US Senator (and former Governor) Strom Thurmond, was a Democrat until 1964, and when he ran for president on a segregationist platform in 1948, the Confederate flag was his standard. But Thurmond was with Beasley last week, seconding the governor's motion to remove the flag from the Capitol.

Yet some South Carolinians, their heartstrings tangled around the 1860s, still revere the Confederacy and all its trappings. McConnell, the state senator, howls that moving the Confederate flag "will amount to cultural genocide." Condon, the attorney general, warns that if the flag is moved, "before long, our history will be rewritten. The children of South Carolina will be taught, in the name of political correctness, to be ashamed of their state's history."

As if there were nothing in their state's history to be ashamed of.

The Confederacy has been extinct for 131 years. Its brief life was the cause of unspeakable sorrow, pain, and death. To insist that its battle flag deserves a place of pride above the statehouse is worse than mossbacked, it is reactionary. It is morally tone-deaf. And it is, to anyone dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, appalling.

The men and boys who followed the Confederate colors into battle may have been honorable and decent, but there was neither honor nor decency in the cause for which they fought. The Civil War was about many things, but it was first and foremost about slavery. South Carolina and the Confederacy went to war to perpetuate the freedom of white Americans to buy and sell black Americans. To be sure, most Confederate soldiers weren't slave owners, and many believed they were fighting in self-defense. But there would have been no war had the South not seceded, and the South seceded to protect chattel slavery.

Conservatives incline to tradition, and this conservative adheres to the credo that that which it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change. But the tradition of flying the Confederate flag over Columbia's skyline is a horrid one. To the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the flag may recollect the bravery of Stonewall Jackson and the cannons at Fort Sumter. To tens of millions of others, it evokes the agony of the Middle Passage and the long nightmare of Jim Crow.

It is not by chance that white supremacist hate groups have adopted the Confederate flag. It is flown at Ku Klux Klan rallies. It is the emblem of punks on the racist fringe. It has been taken up by neo-Nazis in Germany, where the swastika is outlawed. Does that mean that anyone who admires the rebel flag is tainted with bigotry and hate? Of course not. But the bigots and the haters embrace that flag for a reason: It was first raised in defense of the proposition that some men are no better than property.

South Carolina's governor, whose great-great-great grandfather Reuben Beasley fought for the South, has waded into an issue he could have avoided and made a lot of enemies he could have done without. He has also done the right thing. "Any banner we choose to fly over the Capitol," he said, "should be one that everyone can claim as their own." That is manifestly not true of the Confederate flag.

Americans of every color have reason to revile that banner. Three hundred sixty thousand Union soldiers, most of them white, lost their lives, and hundreds of thousands more were wounded, crippled, and shellshocked, in a war started by armies flying that flag.

It is an ongoing affront to the Union dead, as it is to the memory of 10 million enslaved and murdered African innocents, when the flag of the Confederacy whips in the breeze.

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Thuggish censors in the marketplace of ideas

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

Baltimore burns, shops are looted, rioters attack firefighters with bottles and bricks. And amid all the violence and ruin, what drives the chattering class into a froth of indignation? That anyone would use the word "thugs" to describe the vandals and criminals reducing Baltimore to rubble.

As berserkers ran amok Monday, the city's mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, deplored the destruction: "Too many people have invested in building up this city to allow thugs to tear it down."

That set the hounds baying. Rawlings-Blake was accused of using a racial slur. Baltimore City Councilor Carl Stokes angrily told CNN that calling rioters "thugs" is just like calling them the N-word.

The Rev. Jamal Bryant, who delivered the eulogy at Freddie Gray's funeral, repeated the accusation: " 'Thugs' is the 21st-century word for the N-word," he said Wednesday, "and it is repulsive and it is offensive." Wale, the popular Washington, D.C.-based rapper, told Baltimore teens that Rawlings-Blake owed them a direct apology for saying something so "stupid." Others piled on.

It didn't take long for the mayor to surrender. "We don't have thugs in Baltimore.... We have a lot of kids that are acting out," she told a group of church leaders. For good measure, she blamed her "little anger interpreter," pointing to her head in self-abasement.

There was more apologizing online. "I wanted to clarify my comments on 'thugs,'" she tweeted. "When you speak out of frustration and anger, one can say things in a way that you don't mean."

So now in Baltimore, which has the nation's seventh-highest violent crime rate, the nonracial word "thugs" is banished as racist — even when spoken by a black mayor. Thus the degradation of the public discourse proceeds.

Meanwhile, Rawling-Blake's forced walk-back was nothing compared to the self-mortification of Ian Reisner and Mati Weiderpass, two gay hoteliers in New York who hosted a small reception for Senator Ted Cruz on April 20.

The business partners, longtime backers of gay-rights causes, strongly disagree with Cruz on same-sex marriage, but share his views on foreign policy. They invited a dozen guests to meet the Republican presidential hopeful over dinner for a discussion of politics. Apparently they were under the impression that in America it is permissible, even admirable, for voters to talk to politicians, exchanging thoughts on a range of issues.

They know better now.

Reisner and Weiderpass were savaged for having hosted the dinner for Cruz. Activists organized a boycott of their hotels, threatening to "shut the place down" as punishment for talking to the enemy. Within days, the businessmen were begging for mercy, berating themselves as if they were inmates in a North Korean slave-labor camp, forced to confess their crimethink in public.

"I am shaken to my bones by the e-mails, texts, postings and phone calls of the past few days," groveled Reisner on Facebook. "I made a terrible mistake. I was ignorant [and] naïve.... I sincerely apologize for hurting the gay community and so many of our friends, family, allies, customers, and employees.

Two prominent gay businessmen hosted Senator Ted Cruz at a small dinner party.
The backlash they faced from gay activists was poisonous
(Above: Cruz, left, with hotelier Mati Weiderpass)

I will try my best to make up for my poor judgment." Weiderpass followed suit, flagellating himself for a blunder that may have "nullified" his 20 years of supporting gay rights.

More and more, this is what the marketplace of ideas is turning into. The ruthless determination not just to silence opposing points of view, but to humiliate and crush even allies willing to hear an opposing point of view, violates every liberal principle of tolerance, reason, and dialogue in the public sphere.

The language police in Baltimore and the auto-da-fé of Cruz's dinner hosts are but two fresh examples of a phenomenon rising all around us. Commencement speakers are disinvited from college campuses. Mozilla's CEO is forced to resign over a donation made years earlier to a ballot campaign supporting the traditional definition of marriage.

Hillary Clinton declares that abortion rights must be defended with the "political will" needed to change "deep-seated ... religious beliefs." Speech codes and "trigger warnings" are deployed to enforce a spurious — but expanding — right not to be offended or disturbed.

Increasingly, the censors and silencers are at work, stifling ideas, demonizing speakers, ostracizing open-mindedness — decreeing even certain words beyond the pale. It is a dangerous, illiberal, antidemocratic trend.

If we don't rouse ourselves to reverse it now, we may never get the chance.

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Wrong sperm - Right baby: Why the lawsuit?

Wrong sperm, right baby. Why the lawsuit? from the files of Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

Meet Payton Cramblett

Jennifer Cramblett of Uniontown, Ohio, is the mother of an adorable 2-year-old girl named Payton, whom she and her partner call a "dream come true" and love with all their heart. "She's made us the people that we are," Cramblett says. "Never trade it for the world."

If that's the case, Payton will doubtless wonder once she's old enough to Google her own name, why did Cramblett sue the Chicago-area sperm bank that enabled her to get pregnant with her wonderful daughter?

Why did she demand tens of thousands of dollars as compensation for breach of warranty and for what the lawsuit calls Payton's "wrongful birth?"

The answer, Cramblett and her lawyers have claimed in televised interviews, has nothing to do with Payton, and everything to do with punishing the sperm bank for a careless mix-up:

It supplied vials of sperm from Donor No. 330, when Cramblett had selected Donor No. 380. When Cramblett tried to untangle the matter with the sperm bank, she says, the receptionist was rude and hung up on her.

"I am happy that I have a healthy child," Cramblett told NBC. "But I'm not going to let them get away with not being held accountable."

But Cramblett's suit against Midwest Sperm Bank hasn't become a cause célèbre because of a customer service issue. It ignited a furor because of race. Cramblett was inseminated with the sperm of a black man, instead of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed white man she and her partner had picked from the sperm bank's catalogue of donors.

Which means that Payton is biracial — or to use Cramblett's phrase, "obviously mixed race." Hence the lawsuit, and the demand for at least $50,000 in damages. After all, the Ohio couple wasn't expecting to have to raise a child with skin darker than theirs.

Did somebody say racist?

No, no, no, Cramblett insists, this isn't about race at all. "For people to think I don't want this child because of her skin tone is just not the case," she assured Huffington Post. And when Payton is older, she'll understand that "the lawsuit was about a company that had to make changes and give us compensation so that we can go through counseling and learn how to love each other even more."

Sure she will. Because parents who adore their children as a "dream come true" and wouldn't trade them "for the world" always file wrongful-birth lawsuits. Don't they?

It's hard to decide which is more surreal — the race-obsessed complaint Cramblett filed in Cook County Circuit Court, or her after-the-fact pretense that she isn't making an issue of her daughter's race.

Cramblett wants to be paid handsomely for the "personal injuries, medical expense, pain, suffering, emotional distress, and other economic and non-economic losses" caused by Payton's birth. Those hardships include having white relatives who can be "unconsciously insensitive," and Cramblett's "anxiety" at the prospect of enrolling her daughter in an all-white school. Uniontown — the Akron suburb to which Cramblett relocated with her partner for its good schools — she now regards as "too racially intolerant."

That's not all that Cramblett has found "stressful" about motherhood. "Payton has hair typical of an African American girl," the lawsuit notes. "To get a decent cut, Jennifer must travel to a black neighborhood, far from where she lives, where she is obviously different in appearance, and not overtly welcome."

Well. If that doesn't merit a wrongful-birth lawsuit, what does?

Poor Payton. One day she'll read the court documents in this case, and realize that her mother saw racism everywhere she looked, when the only person flipping out about giving birth to a biracial daughter was Payton's mother herself. When the sperm bank receptionist asked Cramblett whether she had selected an African American donor, the Ohio woman snapped:

"No, why would I request that? My partner and I are Caucasian." When she learned that her sperm donor wasn't white after all, she admits, she was filled with "anger, disappointment, and fear."

Midwest Sperm Bank acknowledges its blunder, and it ought to face some legal repercussion for its sloppy record-keeping. But Cramblett could have gotten pregnant by Donor No. 380 and still ended up with a daughter very different from what she expected.

Jennifer Cramblett says her biracial daughter is a "dream come true."
So why is she obsessing over the child's skin color?

Payton could have been born with Down syndrome or deafness; she could have had cystic fibrosis or a congenital heart defect. Then who would her mother be targeting in a lawsuit?

Having a baby isn't like ordering a pair of jeans; you can't return it if isn't to your liking. Anyone who thinks they are entitled to exactly the child they envisioned — and are prepared to fly to court if they don't get it — isn't fit to be a parent.

The world is full of people whose conception was in some way unplanned or unexpected. That doesn't make their births wrongful, or a reason to play the race card. For Payton's sake, let's hope her mother figures that out, and soon.

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