Published in Daily News in the summer of 2015
Unfortunate is too mild a word to describe Nick Gier’s most recent foray into an old controversy (6/25/15). I do not mind a controversy when controversy is absolutely necessary, but it really isn’t called for in this instance. Christ Church is a church that has many members who are active in many aspects of our community life together. Most of our involvement is welcomed by the community outside our church family, but even more of it could be if we could persuade some diehard combatants to lay down their arms.
Part of Nick’s “argument” was connect me to Steve Wilkins, who was once connected to Michael Hill, who has done something before with the Council of Conservative Citizens, who had a web site that was cited by Dylann Roof in his horrendous attempt to set off a race war. I am disappointed—if Nick had just gone two more rounds he could probably have connected me to Kevin Bacon. The only part of this that had any merit or substance is that Steve is a friend of mine.
Nick also cited the Southern Poverty Law Center, the world’s richest civil rights organization ($300 million and counting), as a reliable source of information about hate groups. They were the same group that had to apologize this last February for putting Dr. Ben Carson, the famed neurosurgeon and Republican presidential candidate, in their “extremist file.” The FBI’s hate crimes web page used to link to the SPLC, but they do so no longer, which means that the FBI appears to be quicker on the uptake than Nick Gier is.
There are a host of other scattershot errors in Nick’s piece which would cause me to sail past my word limit in trying to answer him—because quoting out of context takes up significantly less space than providing the needed context does. So let me give just one obvious example under this heading. Nick cited a quotation of me in the Spokesman-Review where I “admitted” that Confederate flags “have adorned office and school walls at times.” To take just one instance of our “outrageous” practices on this score, I do admit that Logos School is a school, and they teach history classes there, and in the history classes they have shown the children pictures of episodes from the war. In those pictures, the Union forces have had their Union flags and the Confederate forces have had their flags. When someone reacts to this kind of thing, they are perhaps—and I merely offer it as a suggestion—grasping at straws.
As it happens, I was quoted yesterday in a CNN article on this subject. They, unlike Nick Gier quoted me accurately. I said, “The Confederate flag can mean that you are at a KKK rally, that you are looking at a truck decal in a NASCAR rally parking lot, that you are at a Skynyrd concert, that you are looking a commemorative calendar painted by a memorabilia artist, that you are driving by a car dealership in rural Virginia, or that you saw a photo of Kanye West taking his confusions to a whole new level.” As that list makes plain, there are uses of the Confederate battle flag that we detest, and there are uses that we don’t detest. One of the uses I personally don’t detest would be that time I saw Joan Baez singing “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” in front of one.
But Nick’s very selective quotations were designed to make me (and our church) look sympathetic to certain attitudes that we find detestable in the extreme. We believe, as a matter of biblically informed conscience, that racial malice and enmity is abhorrent to God, and we reject it as a matter of principle. We believe that Jesus Christ died to bring all the races and tribes of men into one new man, established in Christ.
If the forces of tolerance in our community want to get away from their intolerista reputation, I would suggest a better spokesman than Nick Gier.