Quick history lesson from somebody who used to work five blocks from there...
The South Carolina General Assembly voted in the early 1960s to fly the Confederate Naval Jack (the rectangular St. Andrew's Cross that's commonly referred to as the "Confederate flag") on top of the Statehouse dome, under the US and SC flags. (Trivia--the man who signed this bill into law, by the way, was Governor ERNEST "FRITZ" HOLLINGS, DEMOCRAT. That's generally conveniently forgotten by the Democratic race pimps.)
Anyway. The flag flew up there on top of the Statehouse dome for over 30 years until the NAACP started making noise. The Republican governor at the time, David "Weaseley" Beasley, first stated that the flag was going to stay on the dome, and then did a 180 and came out for taking it down. The flip-flop cost him his job in the 1998 election and put a Democrat, Jim Hodges, in the Governor's office.
Hodges ended up working out a compromise with black legislators and the NAACP where the flag would come down off the dome, and an Army of Northern Virginia battle standard (the square St. Andrew's Cross flag that's shown in a picture in this thread) would be erected behind the existing Confederate Soldiers Memorial on the Statehouse grounds, which is the obelisk in the picture. That obelisk stands in the center of downtown Columbia, at Gervais and Main Streets, and has been there since well before 1900. An African-American monument would also be constructed on the Statehouse grounds, and indeed, it's there now.
The NAACP had agreed to this compromise. All of a sudden, sensing weakness, they reversed themselves and decided to "boycott" the state. Various liberal-minded groups like the Democratic Party and the NCAA have gone along with them, but in the end, the economic impact has been negligible. The only people that have been hurt by this have been...wait for it...black business owners, primarily in the Lowcountry, who specialized in tours of the black history down there (the Gullah culture, which is absolutely fascinating).
So the flag that you see is not one of the three actual political flags of the CSA. It was the battle flag of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, where thousands of South Carolinians fought and died. It flies behind a memorial to dead Confederate soldiers that's been in the same spot for around 125 years. There are no Confederate flags flying over any of the governmental buildings in South Carolina that I'm aware of. It's a soldier's flag at a soldier's monument.
Understand that since it's been in place, the forces of tolerance and diversity have tried to burn that flag twice and tear down the flagpole at least once, have tried their hardest to economically throttle an entire state's tourism industry (and failed miserably), and have in general used that flag as a bludgeon to try and paint an entire racially diverse state as some sort of 1960s throwback, which is patently false. And now we have Chris "Waitress Sandwich" Dodd attempting to tell the good people of South Carolina what they can and can't put on their own Statehouse grounds as a memorial. Please forgive South Carolinians if they don't take too kindly to it.
}:-)4
"David 'Weaseley' Beasley"
LOL, your northern cousins in NC refer to Governor Mike Easley, Democrat, as "Weasley."
Why was Senator Dodd politicizing in a church.....I thought the Democrats believed in that sep. of church and state?
Thank you for the historical background.
Certainly Sen. Dodd would brush it off as irrelevant to his selfish power grab.