Mitt Romney joins call for South Carolina to remove Confederate flag

Mitt Romney joined calls for legislation to have the Confederate flag removed from state house in South Carolina. 

|
Chris Keane/Reuters/File
A Confederate flag flies outside the South Carolina State House in Columbia, South Carolina in this file photo from 2012.

Republican and Democrat lawmakers are now pledging to introduce legislation to have the Confederate flag removed from South Carolina's State House grounds, days after an alleged white supremacist opened fire in a traditionally black church, killing nine.

One of the nine who died was a South Carolina lawmaker. Has the killing shifted thinking among state lawmakers to the point where the controversial symbol may be taken down?  

Not so fast.

The South Carolina General Assembly is not in session, and therefore cannot vote, until January.

But on Saturday, Mitt Romney increased the pressure to act, reiterating a long-held position, in a tweet.

South Carolina Democrat House Minority Leader Rep. Todd Rutherford, of Columbia, said on Friday that he would reintroduce legislation that would bring the Confederate flag down.

“I can’t stand across the street from that church, knowing what went on in there and why, and act like symbols don’t matter,” Representative Rutherford said to The Post and Courier on Friday. “That young man had a flag on his chest of hatred. He had the flag on his car of hatred. He believed on it, acted on it. And if South Carolina government is serious about it, we have to take that flag down.”

Rutherford has tried to get a similar bill through the legislature in the past, and has been unsuccessful. But bipartisan cooperation from Republican State Rep. Norman “Doug” Brannon of Spartanburg may aid Rutherford’s renewed efforts.

“I will introduce that bill,” Representative Brannon said, in an emotional interview with MSNBC on Friday.  

Rep. Brannon spoke of his friend, Clementa Pinckney, a former state senator and a pastor at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, who was killed in the Charleston shooting.

"I had a friend die Wednesday night for no reason other than he was a black man," he said.

Brannon said he would pre-introduce a bill to get the flag down as soon as December, in anticipation of the Assembly going back into session in January.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley ordered the American and Palmetto State flags be lowered in mourning, but defended her office against criticism for the Confederate flag still flying at full staff. She said that only the state legislature can change the flag, which is part of a monument honoring the state’s Civil War soldiers.

Lonnie Randolph, president of the South Carolina conference of the NAACP told The Post Courier that he didn’t think the removal of the flag would change the attitude of people — but it would change the way the world perceives the state.

The debate in South Carolina comes on the heels of a Supreme Court decision regarding the Confederate symbol. The Sons of Confederate Veterans group argued that under the First Amendment it has a free speech right to express its view on a specialty Texas license plate, and that the state of Texas should not censor their message because some people find it offensive.

The nation's highest court disagreed.

“We hold that Texas’ specialty license plate designs constitute government speech and that Texas was consequently entitled to refuse to issue plates featuring SCV’s proposed design,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in the majority opinion, The Christian Science Monitor reported.

Republican US Senator and 2016 presidential hopeful Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said in an interview with CNN Friday morning that the Confederate flag was “part of who we are” in the state, but he tempered his stance later that day. He told Fusion after an emotional vigil Friday evening,  “We’ll see what they want to do. We’ll take it up in January. I think it’s a debate that needs to happen.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Mitt Romney joins call for South Carolina to remove Confederate flag
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2015/0620/Mitt-Romney-joins-call-for-South-Carolina-to-remove-Confederate-flag
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe