People in Valdese are up in arms over a speech made at its Founders Day Festival by Archdale pastor Herman White. One of the "credible" witnesses claims "he heard White saying things like black people should still be slaves and that the races should not mix."
Since there's absolutely no chance that those things were actually said, what is motivating the false claims? Apparently, White's "racist remarks" were the fact that he criticized Abraham Lincoln and called the Gettysburg Address "political garbage." As libertarian commentator Britt Combs sees it, "The mere suggestion that federal power is anything less than divine marks the speaker irrefutably a racist."
Nail on the head. As another libertarian, Rand Paul, recently discovered, as soon as the feds discover that someone with a microphone is onto them, the klan-watchers come out and start discovering [planting?] white sheets in closets.
Unfortunately, Combs takes his analysis one step farther:
What White, the SCV, the League of the South, the Southern Party and all the other pro-South groups miss is this: The Confederate government was evil too. ... If there is a future for freedom, if libertarians succeed in resisting the growth of Washington's empire, if Americans regain an interest in individual liberty, property rights, human rights and all that, it won't have anything to do with the C.S.A.
Evil? What exactly was "evil" about the closest thing this world has seen in the past 150 years to a true American constitutionalist government with respect for states rights? Of course, the answer is slavery, under which "priceless individuals were murdered and ruined." Murdered?
Like Paul, who was eventually convinced to denounce the South of the 1960s, Combs has fallen for the media manipulations and distortions about the South of the 1860s -- the same manipulators and distorters that rose up to attack Herman White last week.
Yes, the Confederacy wasn't perfect, and it's a good thing that slavery is gone. But it was hardly a unique institution to the Confederacy [a nation that only lasted about four years]. And equating the institution to murder is downright ignorant.
What Combs and other small-government types should understand immediately is this: The Confederacy is attacked, not because it promoted slavery, but because it promoted freedom. And that's the same reason White was attacked last week, and the same reason Paul was attacked the week before that. The same fate will meet Combs or anyone else who comes remotely close to helping "Americans regain an interest in individual liberty, property rights, human rights and all that." Anyone who doesn't have the stomach for it needs to get out of the fight right now.
