America is an odd place. It still follows the imperial measurement system, allows almost anyone to buy guns, uses Fahrenheit instead of Celsius and refers to a sport called "football" that should by any visual measure be called "handegg". And they have a habit of not settling debates that really should have died down decades ago. For example, on Monday, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley made news by calling for the lowering of the Confederate flag – the one used by the side that fought to keep slavery in the civil war 150 years ago – from outside the state assembly building.
That's right. More than a century-and-a-half after Abraham Lincoln and the Allied North beat the Confederate South in the American Civil War, fought primarily over the question of slavery, there were still states in the South flying the flag of the losers, i.e. the slave owners. And it took a real tragedy, with the death of nine black people at the hands of a white supremacist, to convince Haley to call for the removal of the flag from the state assembly building.
"Today, we are here in a moment of unity in our state, without ill will, to say it is time to move the flag from the Capitol grounds," Haley said. Calling to remove this symbol of the country's racist past isn't a no-brainer. Republican politicians, like Haley, have for the longest time defended its use as a symbol of the South and a reference to the principle of state's rights, rather than a belief in slave-owning.
To get a full sense of how absurd this is though, you only have to look at the flag in front of the state after the Charleston killings. While the US flag was brought down to half-mast, along with the flag of South Carolina, the Confederate flag stayed up, because by law, it cannot be moved except through a two-thirds majority vote in the state assembly.
No one explains how ridiculous this is better than Last Week Tonight host John Oliver.
Here you can also see Governor Nikki Haley, fully explaining her decision to openly call for the Confederate Flag to be taken down, a bold take that many others in her party would have found very hard to do.
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That's right. More than a century-and-a-half after Abraham Lincoln and the Allied North beat the Confederate South in the American Civil War, fought primarily over the question of slavery, there were still states in the South flying the flag of the losers, i.e. the slave owners. And it took a real tragedy, with the death of nine black people at the hands of a white supremacist, to convince Haley to call for the removal of the flag from the state assembly building.
"Today, we are here in a moment of unity in our state, without ill will, to say it is time to move the flag from the Capitol grounds," Haley said. Calling to remove this symbol of the country's racist past isn't a no-brainer. Republican politicians, like Haley, have for the longest time defended its use as a symbol of the South and a reference to the principle of state's rights, rather than a belief in slave-owning.
To get a full sense of how absurd this is though, you only have to look at the flag in front of the state after the Charleston killings. While the US flag was brought down to half-mast, along with the flag of South Carolina, the Confederate flag stayed up, because by law, it cannot be moved except through a two-thirds majority vote in the state assembly.
No one explains how ridiculous this is better than Last Week Tonight host John Oliver.
Here you can also see Governor Nikki Haley, fully explaining her decision to openly call for the Confederate Flag to be taken down, a bold take that many others in her party would have found very hard to do.