The Civil War ended 150 years ago today. Why do most people not know this? Jay Elias writes why:
The battles surrounding the Civil War are still with us. Right now, there is an active campaign in this country to persuade Americans that the opposition to so-called Religious Freedom Acts in Indiana and Arkansas are a new fight, the latest campaign in an ever-expanding constellation of ‘gay rights’ that is attacking “traditional America” – including the First Amendment. Some, like Ross Douthat of the New York Times, want to portray the insistence on this principle is an example of how the center on these issues has changed a lot so quickly that “[p]ositions taken by, say, the president of the United States and most Democratic politicians a few short years ago are now deemed the purest atavism, [and] the definition of bigotry gets more and more elastic.” (Douthat is also, by the way, still very sorry for speaking at a fundraiser last year for the Alliance Defending Freedom, one of America’s most extreme anti-LGBT groups.)
What these campaigners don’t want known is that this is actually one of the oldest civil rights battles in America. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 prohibited discrimination in access to inns, public conveyances, and places of amusement such as theaters – from the end of Reconstruction it was well understood that discrimination by providers of services to the general public was a key element to the denial of equality by the ruling majority against the unfavored minority. This principle was reaffirmed both in state laws such as the Unruh Civil Rights Act of 1959 in California, which was the model for similar laws in other states; in federal laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and by the Supreme Court, in decisions likeHeart of Atlanta Motel Inc. v. United States and Katzenbach v. McClung. What today’s activists for civil rights are fighting for is in fact the same things that civil rights activists have been fighting for over the last 140 years – that all Americans should have the right to purchase the services offered to other Americans in the free market.
Those who would stand athwart history demanding that it stop today wish and hope that their audience is ignorant of history. They believe that they can hurl accusations of appeasement at supporters of a negotiated agreement with Iran, confident that memories of Neville Chamberlain, the Munich Agreement, and the world of 1938 are sufficiently distant that they will get away with it. They believe they can claim that the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott and so many others are isolated, unrelated incidents which are being made into a big deal by a rapacious media and race-baiting outsiders, confident that we will have forgotten what Ida B. Wells wrote about demonstrative lynching as a form of social control in 1892.
They think that when the bells ring across America tomorrow, many Americans will not know why.
UPDATE: This is from the National Park Services’ website about Appomattox Courthouse:
On Palm Sunday (April 9), 1865, Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, Virginia signaled the end of the Southern States attempt to create a separate nation. It set the stage for the emergence of an expanded and more powerful Federal government. In a sense the struggle over how much power the central government would hold had finally been settled.
Odd way to sum up the Civil War.
Slavery? Hello?