I think there's a difference between honoring and memorializing. The wreath should not have been sent on Jefferson Davis's birthday, as it was until Bush I; but sending it on Memorial Day, when we remember those Americans who died, is entirely appropriate. Forgiving others their sins is the bedrock of successful human societies; it is time to forgive the South its sins, and to honor southern dead without honoring their mistaken cause. They were, after all, Americans. May they rest in peace.

This is an example of the left's use of "BUT" relativism, as in "I'm sorry I made a mistake about some of the facts BUT Bush is still a wrong and terrible person."



Anyone who considers that passage an apology is deluded.

If you take the modern day position that the Civil War was about slavery, then sending any wreath to confederate soldiers would be racist. But considering the average confederate soldier owned no slaves, and was instead fighting for his state against a meddling federal government, a wreath would seem in order from any person who wonders what purpose the Department of Labor is serving. Once conservatives concede that the south was wrong for secession, then how powerful are our arguments for limited government?

Hi --



You guys touched on it, but it's stark:



Mo equates honoring the Confederate dead at Arlington with 'honoring the Confederacy'.

Tom:



Secession makes democracy impossible because every time the Federal government does something you don't like you can leave the Union. On the one hand, I'd rather NH was its own country, but on the other I guess I welcome kinship with the rest of you poor benighted souls.

old maltese:



Well, they were traitors...

This tradition was started by Woodrow Wilson, the first southerner to be elected president after the Civil War. I had never heard of it before and would just as soon stop it. Yes, they were Americans and not bad people in general. Nevertheless they were fighting in a bad cause which should not be honored.

Putting a wreath over a grave does not imply agreement, much less a desire to honor, every idea the dead man ever held. As for the Confederates, they thought they had a right to secede; the question of secession was intentionally left unresolved by the founding fathers, because they could not agree on the right answer; the question was settled by warfare and many deaths.



Today, we should bring to those misguided southerners the attitude Lincoln called for in his second Inaugural Address:

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves . . ."

It would have been nice if the justice hadn't had to wait until the 1960s.

So, OK for the Japanese prime minister to lay

a wreath at Yasukuni Shrine?



My great-granddaddy commanded a regiment of the

CSA and owned slaves. He was also one of

the "Glorious Eight" who returned S. Carolina

to white supremacy after the federal troops

were withdrawn in 1876 and he took the

oath and got his civil rights restored.



People who say the Civil War was not about

slavery don't know what they are talking

about.

It's fine for their Prime Minister, the more troubling question is things like Reagan going to Bitburg.

Harry is, of course, correct in saying that the Confederacy was about preserving slavery, and it was evil. But slavery was not just a Confederate sin or a southern sin. It was an American sin -- the American original sin, as it happens -- and it cannot be expiated by tieing it to the scapegoat Confederacy and sending it out into the wilderness.



The soldiers of the Confederacy were Americans and they were not fighting for anything that could theretofore have been said to be unAmerican. In a meaningful way, they, and the Union dead, died for our sins. I think it is entirely fitting and proper that we remember these American soldiers on Memorial Day.

Orrin,



I don’t know that the founders were seeking democracy, other than as a check and balance of other units of government. Only the House of Representatives were popularly elected in early America. But kinship with New Hampshire has been a pleasure (other than the 2000 Primary).



Tom