RESPECTABLE TIMING | 2000-03-11
After losing his tax deductibility over it and fighting for years, Bob Jones has abandoned his University's ban on interracial dating. He says it obscures his religious message. As before, the problem with this belated justification is his timing.
It was at the height of the liberal anti-flag push that Bob Jones switched sides and called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol dome. Business leaders and the Board of Trustees at the Citadel had all lined up in a demand to remove the flag, and the NAACP had just declared a boycott on South Carolina.
At that moment, Bob Jones declared the flag should come down. He said that had nothing to do with the momentary popularity it bought him with the liberals. He said he had suddenly decided that the flag should come down, and he quoted an almost two-thousand-year-old passage from St. Paul to the effect that convinced Christians should yield in minor things to those of lesser faith.
I emphasize the age of that quote to point out what a coincidence it was that Bob Jones discovered it just when the liberals needed him.
Bob Jones and the Republicans backing down on everything at this moment will cost us dearly. As Israel has found out, if you yield to terrorists, the human cost always ends up being greater in the long run.
Once again, Bob Jones has shown the liberals that, if they shout loud enough, we will cave in.
Many a person has been moaning to me about the fact that the Confederate flag is now classed with the swastika as a liberally-banned symbol. In Boston, the SHAMROCK has been banned in some places for the same reason! But this has been a natural result of a long process.
When the courts made it law that you could fire someone for being a right wing extremist -- a bigot -- but not for being a left wing extremist -- a Communist -- no one objected. We were too afraid of being labeled bigots to stand up for the rights of hard-core racists. Europe freely attacks the US death penalty, but we consider their ban on right wing extremism to be their own business. Meanwhile, European countries now have proud former Soviet supporters IN THEIR RULING COALITIONS, while they unite to ban Austria from including an anti-immigration in party in its government.
So, when the liberal full-court press is on, Bob Jones backs down again.
As I said, the term "courageous respectable conservative" is an oxymoron. So naturally if we keep courting respectability we are going to keep backing down like Bob Jones and Bush. So naturally the terrorists will win this time and demand more the next. The Confederate flag is just the beginning. We are just beginning to pay for our former cowardice.
This has always been the way of the left. They would attack the far right, then the not-so-far-right. By this time, what was once the moderate right is now the "far right." All they needed was for the rightists to abandon people they did not approve of, and wait for the leftists to come to them. That is exactly what we have done.
If we are going to be Southern nationalists, we are going to have to pay some attention to international stands. If we wait until Austria is crushed and everyone to the right of us is banned by the international community, an independent South is going to mean exactly nothing.
After crushing Austria and other European rightists, the international community will not tolerate any deviation from a Southern nation. They will simply ban us from doing anything the United States Government is not already doing. They will not tolerate privately-owned firearms or a death penalty. They will not stop until everyone, including the independent South, does what they want them to.
And, as in American hiring, only the right will be banned. The extreme left will have all the rights, and they will be enforced by the international community and our own Confederate courts.
And, of course, we will claim we are only backing down because the Bible told us to.