Massacre In South Carolina: The Confederate Flag Still Flies

Today I’m not going to stick to the topic of this blog.  Instead, I want to talk about something that, I’m sure, you’ve heard about by now:  the massacre inside the Emanuel AfricanMethodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina .

One of the cruelest ironies is that members of a Bible study group—including the church's pastor, who also happens to be a  South Carolina State senator—in one of America’s oldest historically black churches were gunned down by a young white man who sat with them on the eve of Juneteenth— a few days after the 800^th anniversary of King John issuing Magna Carta.

And the Confederate Flag flies in front of the State Capitol.

A century and a half after slaves in South Carolina and Texas and other states got word that they were free men and women, a young man hadn’t gotten the message that the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees all citizens, regardless of their skin color, the rights enumerated in the first ten amendments (a.k.a. the Bill of Rights).  Heck, he didn’t even get the message thatthere’s no such country as Rhodesia anymore.  He was simply acting from the same sort of ignorance, the same sort of hate, that left earlier generations of young African Americans hanging from trees or at the bottoms of rivers.

And the Confederate Flag flies in front of the State Capitol.

More than a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, in the state in which the opening shot of the US Civil War was fired, a young man entered a Bible Study group and waited for the “right” moment to shoot someone nearly as young as he is, people old enough to be his parents, grand-parents and great-grandparents.  He shattered the peace and sanctity they found in what, for many generations of African-Americans—and, perhaps, for those members of the Bible Study group—has been their closest-knit, if not their only, sanctuary.

And the Confederate flag flies in front of the State Capitiol.   

From the church's website.

A pastor was killed along with a deacon and laypeople.  Families lost sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers; friends lost friends and people lost spouses and other loved ones.  They loved and were loved; they raised families and were raised by families.  And they contributed to the lives of their communities through their professional and volunteer work, and the loves and interests they shared with those around them.

And the Confederate flag flies in front of the State Capitol.

Dylann Storm Roof, in an instant, ended the lives of Rev. (and Sen.) Clementa Pickney, Mira Thompson, Daniel Simmons Sr., Cynthia Hurd, Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Tywanza Sanders, De Payne Middleton, Ethel Lance and her cousin Susie Jackson. All of them, one hundred and fifty years after Juneteenth.

And a Confederate flag in front of the State Capitol hasn't even been loweredto half-mast.

An ID For Her True Self

Every trans person I've known who began living in her or his true gender as an adult wished that she or he could have so lived as a child and as a teenager.  And each one of us has some thing or another we wish we could have done, or had, during those years.

Some of them are major, such as, well, getting to live in our true genders--or, more specifically, having relationships with family members and friends as the people we truly are.  Then there are those seemingly-trivial things that could have added to the quality of our lives.

Throughout my childhood and teen years--in fact, through most of my life--I hated to be photographed. I'm still not crazy about having my picture taken now because, well, I'm not terribly photogenic, to put it mildly. But in my earlier years, I felt that every photo of me was a lie, a deception, because it was an image of what I was supposed to be rather than of who I was.

Of course, everyone jokes about how terrible their ID photos are.  Some actually believe that the Department of Motor Vehicles requires their employees to be on psychosis-inducing medication before taking photos for drivers' licenses.  But those of us who wanted to live as the people we were--and tried to seize moments of doing so by "cross dressing"--knew that having the kinds of IDs we had, in essence, forced us to be the people depicted in them.

Chase Culpepper understands what I've just described.  The 17-year-old South Carolinan was forced to dress male for the drivers' license photo, even though she identifies as female.  The Transgender Legal Defense and Education fund filed a suit on her behalf.  As a result, a settlement--announced this morning--will allow her to wear female clothes and makeup for the first major piece of identification many young people receive--and the one some regard as a passport to adulthood. And now she gets to be a Southern Belle!

Kincannon Uber Alles

As Horace Boothroyd III so aptly put it, Todd Kincannon wasn't talking about places where kids sit around campfires toasting marshmallows and singing Kumbayah.

Who is Todd Kincannon?  He's the former head of the Republican Party in South Carolina--the state that, per capita, has put more flat-out lunatics into public office than any other. 

That state gave the world none other than Strom Thurmond,  who defended his support of segregation and opposition to civil rights legislation long after the last Tyrannosaurus Rex died out. All right, I'm exaggerating a bit, but you get the idea.  The guy lived to be 100, and served as a Senator right up to the end, all the while trying to bring back Jim Crow laws.  Finally, just after he died, it was revealed that in his early 20's, he fathered a child with his family's then-16-year-old Black housekeeper.  

Todd Kincannon follows in that noble tradition.  This is what he tweeted:  "There are people who respect transgender rights.  And there are people who think you should be put in a camp.  That's me."

What I find really astounding is that he actually acknowledges that some people respect transgender rights.  If he doesn't respect them--even if he hates us--what does that make him?

Oh, but that wasn't enough.  He followed up his twit's twitter with this:  "If concentration camps aren't going to work, mental institutions will do just fine."

Somehow it seemed appropriate to post Kincannon's remarks on the 75th Anniversary of Kristallnacht.