The Republican lesson of the year seems to be when you put one foot in your mouth, take extra time to sit on down and serve yourself a second helping.
South Carolina’s Catherine Templeton has always had the ability to say a few off-color things. But at a speaking event at Bob Jones University, she doubled down on past rhetoric regarding the civil war.
apnews.com/…
Democrats on Friday took Catherine Templeton to task for telling a crowd at Bob Jones University that her relatives fought on behalf of the Confederacy not to protect slavery but because “the federal government was trying to tell us how to live.”
“We didn’t need them to tell us how to live way back then, and we don’t need them to tell us how to live today,” Templeton told the crowd of mostly students.
That’s right. According to Templeton, the Civil War may have been a big mistake, and wasn’t at all fought over slavery, but because the federal government thought they had the right to tell people how to live. Of course, that meant telling them how to live, without, you know, slaves, but to Templeton, that point may have been secondary.
Former state Chair Jaime Harrison responded on Twitter today, calling her out for the rhetoric:
This isn’t Templeton’s first brush with controversial comments about the Civil War:
apnews.com/...
Templeton caught flak last year when, during a Pickens County GOP meeting, she said she supported state lawmakers’ efforts to remove the Confederate battle flag from the Statehouse grounds after a deadly shooting by a man who embraced the flag, but was still proud of the state’s Confederate history.
“I think what we did was we reacted, and I think that’s what happens in government a lot,” Templeton told the audience. “I am proud to be from South Carolina. I am proud of the Confederacy. But I’m not going to second-guess what the people in the Statehouse did when I wasn’t there.”
While there is absolutely nothing wrong with being proud of your state, it is a bit odd in the modern era to voice pride in the works of the Confederacy. But let’s not kid: South Carolina left the union for only one reason, Slavery.
In a speech to the floor in the state house, December, 1860, Laurence Massillon Keitt uttered these words: "Our people have come to this on the question of slavery."
And his speeches were echoed by the body, who contended that the Union plan to end slavery was something they would fight against.
The official declaration of South Carolina regarding their exit makes it clear:
avalon.law.yale.edu/...
We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
Templeton, seems to be arguing that those who left the union apparently didn’t mean any of that, and she knows what the leadership of South Carolina -really- meant then, and hey, she’s proud of the Confederacy.
In 2018.