Poll: 29 percent of Mississippians would back a new Confederacy. Regarding the poll results and Jury duty.

The Sun Herald had an article about a recent poll taken of attitudes towards secession.

http://www.sunherald.com/2014/07/17/5701899/poll-29-percent-of-mississippians.html

The question pollsters question was:

"If there were another Civil War today, would you side with the Confederate States of America or the United States of America?"

It was run by Public Policy Polling (PPP). It was asked of 691 Mississippians.

Of all Mississippians polled, 29% would back the Confederate States of America (CSA).

The article states that only 2% of African Americans would support the CSA. One can only imagine how the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) would be interested in locating these African Americans to parade them around with a Confederate flag.

The article doesn't tell the statistics regarding white people in the U.S.A.

The article does break it down by party affiliation though.

Democrats: 82% for the USA and 9% for the CSA.
Republicans: 41% for the USA and 37% for the CSA.

What is astounding is that less than half the Republicans in Mississippi would support the USA.

Perhaps the whole point of this poll was to show that Republicans aren't that patriotic. As I have stated in earlier blog postings one of the Republicans regular political activities was to assert that the Democrats were somehow unpatriotic and the Republicans were more patriotic. When you have less than half of your supporters choose the USA your assertion of being more patriotic becomes absurd.

The results were further broken down by who people supported in the Republican primary.

For Thad Cochran supporters 61% chose the USA which I think is very low, but not surprising for a candidate that interviewed in Southern Partisan, 22% chose the CSA.

For Tea Party challenger McDaniels, 38% chose the USA and 37% chose the CSA. What is rather amazing is that 62% would choose the CSA or aren't sure that they would chose the USA.

I was not able to find a link to the poll results at the PPP website.

I think that in Mississippi screening out pro-CSA supporters from jury pools is a very reasonable activity. People who would choose the CSA should not be be jurors.

The poll adds additional justification to my article on jury duty published in the Black Commentator. The following is the free guest link.

http://www.blackcommentator.com/507/507_confederacy_jury_selection_sebesta_hague_guests_share.html

Article on Neo-Confederate who won a Republican party primary in Maryland and neo-Confederate attempts to get involved with mainstream politics.

This article was published in the Huffington Post recently.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-hutson/meet-marylands-white-nati_b_5572556.html

It turns out that Michael Peroutka, a theocrat and former League of the South board member, was able to win the Republican party primary for an Anne Arundel County Council race in Maryland. and won a seat on the Republican Party Central Committee there. He runs an organization called Institute on the Constitution which is fairly openly neo-Confederate in its views.

What I found somewhat ominous is that Joseph Delimater III, who is closely tied to Peroutka, ran unopposed in the Republican primary for sheriff and could be elected in the general election.

The article is worth reading. It shows that neo-Confederates are not confined to some remote rural area or a particular region of the nation, or marginal.

Professor at Valdosta University in Georgia says that the State of Georgia should drop all Confederate commemorations

The article is online here:

http://clatl.com/atlanta/activists-state-should-end-all-confederate-memorials/Content?oid=11620447

From Confederate Memorial Day to streets named for Ku Klux Klan founders, the state of Georgia should pull the plug on its official support of Confederacy celebrations, say two Valdosta activists in a recent open letter to Gov. Nathan Deal and the entire General Assembly. 

Such "Southern heritage" memorials are simply taxpayer-funded pseudo-history that celebrates white supremacy, they say. And state leaders so far aren't biting.

The letter is the brainchild of Mark Patrick George, a Valdosta State University sociologist who runs a project studying a local lynching spree of the early 1900s, and the Rev. Floyd Rose of the Lowndes/Valdosta chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

"We contact you today to respectfully call for an end to the state of Georgia's endorsement, promotion and support of all Confederate holidays, events, and its management of historic sites and monuments related to the Confederacy. We also call for an immediate change to all state roads and highways currently named for Confederate leaders," says the letter, sent on June 23. 

George says they are acting on their own, though they have started reaching out to civil rights groups. They want to spark discussion of racial issues and raise awareness that the "heritage, not hate" mythos is factually wrong. The idea came from a documentary film that George, who grew up in South Georgia, is making about Civil War re-enactors, many of whom, he says, falsely believe the Confederacy was not primarily motivated by slavery and racism. 

"What exactly are we celebrating?" George asks. The ultimate answer, he says, is leaders and soldiers "who said God declared white people should be in charge of black people ... Where are the thoughts and feelings of African-Americans who are citizens of this state? Black people are paying for, in many ways, their own degradation."

The whole Lost Cause nonsense needs to go into the garbage can. More people are seeing this.

Washington and Lee decide to pull Confederate Battle flag. Excuses and rationalizations don't seem to work anymore.

It appears that Washington & Lee University has decided to pull Confederate Battle flags out of the Lee Chapel. Evidently excuses and rationalizations weren't accepted by minority students in The Committee who were fighting Washington and Lee University's long standing plan to be a Confederate shrine. The story is here:

http://www.roanoke.com/news/virginia/w-l-will-remove-confederate-battle-flags-from-lee-chapel/article_a13cae23-4367-56c5-9861-8ffd90e673e1.html

I don't know if Washington & Lee University tried the rationalization that since African Americans spoke at the Lee Chapel the Battle flags were okay. Perhaps if Kevin Levin had talked to The Committee the flags would still be up, I doubt it though.

This is a significant breakthrough. As each university gives up pandering to the Lost Cause, other universities that continue to pander to the Lost Cause will find their pandering increasingly obvious and unacceptable to the public.

As one institution, place or group gives up the Lost Cause the remaining groups and institutions that still pander to it will increasingly seem unacceptable.

Though this doesn't seem to be a great victory. Mostly the university is shuffling things around.

Starting to speak before the public about the neo-Confederate movement

In mid-August I will be speaking to the public about the neo-Confederate movement. I have been working on a Powerpoint presentation. Now I am working on what type of portable technology I want to use to do presentations with small groups.

With the time for the presentation I don't have time to cover all the various animosities that neo-Confederates have to one minority or another, so I am just treating on the topic of civil rights. The primary focus is going to be the neo-Confederates movement's hostility towards egalitarianism from their promotion of pro-slavery theology to their opposition to civil rights legislation to their hostility to democracy itself and the critical supports for a democracy such as public education.

The Southern Partisan hasn't been published for some time, so I am focusing more on the contemporary neo-Confederate movement. Some of the items from the Confederate Veteran, Southern Mercury, and other publications should get a lot of interest.

I believe that an informed public is a public which will critically examine what the neo-Confederates.

Hillary Clinton and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC)

Bill Clinton sent three letters of congratulations to the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), the first of them in slightly less than a year after Carol Moseley-Braun's victory over the UDC in the U.S. Senate. The link to the story is online.

http://www.blackcommentator.com/274/274_clinton_udc.html

Bill Clinton never retracted his letters or apologized for them. The question comes up whether Hillary Clinton would ever send a letter of congratulations to a neo-Confederate group or would send a wreath to the Confederate Monument in the Arlington Cemetery.

I will have to write both of them.

In the news on www.salon.com. Article about neo-Confederates, secession and religious extremists

There is an article about neo-Confederates and religious extremists at Salon.

http://www.salon.com/2014/07/01/christian_right_secession_fantasy_spooky_neo_confederate_talk_grows_louder_at_the_fringes/