If the flag is removed from a public display at a monument, quite certainly freedom of speech has been violated. Who owns the public monument? Hint, we do. Chris B.
I must concur with others, mostly.
It's a public monument. The flag will only come down if the legislature says it should come down. There's no free speech issue unless they start banning it from private monuments or displays.
There is, though, a sort of gray area where free speech isn't technically restricted by the government, but in which people are still afraid to say what they are thinking. This can occur when popular pressure and threats of economic reprisal exist. In extreme cases, this might even extend to physical reprisals or threats of the same. An example in the current situation is the removal of flag related materials from Amazon. I don't believe for one minute that Jeff Bezos and company had a sudden flare up of conscience that made them remove Civil War wargames from the shelves. Rather, I'm fairly confident that they saw a potential boycott brewing, and did a calculation of how much they made by selling confederate flag related materials, versus how much they would lose in other sales from upset customers who suddenly thought of that flag as an issue. Technically, no one's free speech was violated, but if you can't see how that has a chilling effect on free expression, you aren't trying very hard.
On a different note, I was thinking about "heritage", and what that meant in this context. Is there anything that flag could symbolize, related to heritage, other than slavery or segregation? Isn't that pretty much the only heritage that binds that region together?
I don't think so. I thought of two big things. There are lots of little things, like grits and sweet tea, but those wouldn't get anyone all that worked up about regionalism, but I thought of two big things. The first is simply family. Go back to 1961 when those flags started reviving in a big way. Think about how a sixty year old state legislator might view that flag. It might make him think about the soldiers who fought in that war, and that might mean grandpa. 100 years is a long time, but not so long that some of those people would have actually known a few Civil War veterans. There might be more great-grandparents, but society was a lot less mobile in those days, and Southern society even less so than the rest of the country. If you lived in the South in 1961, it's a good bet that you had ancestors who fought in that war on the Confederate side, and not just distant, hypothetical, ancestors, but really people that even if you didn't remember them, you could probably find their tombstone on Decoration Day.
Another big thing, and this might sound stupid, but I think it's real, is that accent. When a Southerner starts talking, everyone knows he's a southerner. It marks them as distinct from the rest of the nation. It's not as extreme as distinctive skin tones or facial features, but it's close. Things like that make people bind together, and help make them feel that part of their identity is associated with that region of the country. When there's a symbol strongly associated with that region, it's not odd that those people who are part of that region might identify with that symbol, whether or not they cling to the ideology that is associated with that symbol, or generally with the region it represents.
In other words, that symbol is undoubtedly associated with racism and slavery, but that doesn't mean that is the only thing it's associated with.
I still think that the fact so many modern day users of the flag publicly disavow racism and hate groups should be seen as a victory. You are better off leaving the flag and getting those disavowals than you would be if you could get rid of the flag.
