This is inexcusable. Unconscionable.  A seriously dick-ish thing to publish.  Really CNN?  You are already becoming a joke of a network rivaling Fox “News.”  Is this what you really want to go with?

I am a GRITS – Girl Raised In The South.  I am also politically pretty darn liberal, when you get right to it.  And for the most part I have no problem reconciling these two aspects of myself.  I luuuuv sweet tea, apple pie and country music (except for the ridiculous “patriotic” songs).  The seasons I’m accustomed to are Summer and Not-Summer, and I dig my southern drawl that gets more pronounced as I get sleepy or drunk.  I am also an ardent supporter of gay marriage, healthcare reform, and responsible diplomacy with foreign states.  I believe slavery is a horrible part of our heritage, but I also recognize how and why it developed.  I also understand exactly why the southern states chose to secede and formed the Confederacy.  You can go through my family tree and cross out a significant portion of a generation that died in the Civil War (even on the side of my family that I like) and you can bet your britches that they weren’t fighting to keep the right to torture black people.

There is a statue in memorial to the Confederate soldiers who gave their lives on the campus of my former college.  It seems like every few years someone gets riled up and campaigns to get it taken down.  But thus far the university hasn’t budged, and I’m thankful.  The Civil War was fought because the agrarian South feared being subjugated to the industrial North.  The main issues that caused this war are very much alive and hotly debated today.  And I do mean TODAY, April 12, 2010.  It was a conflict between federal power and the rights of individual states to legislate for their population.  Right now at least 5 states have filed lawsuits to have the healthcare law overturned based on this very idea.  Need I even bring up gay marriage?  And as contentious as the political climate is right now, in my mind it isn’t at all a stretch to see how, faced with the loss of the engine that drove their entire economic system, the Confederate states felt that remaining a part of the Union had become unacceptable.

This article is ridiculous and shameful.  Mr. Martin has strayed far from the realm of facts and journalism; CNN should have the sense to keep this sort of rubbish off of their newsreel.  Yet we see the same shift toward radical, inflammatory reporting that has been exemplified by Fox “News.”  (I refuse to refer to them with any name that would imply that they are, in fact, a real news outlet)  Where integrity in journalism was once a goal of utmost pride, now we find that news is purposefully and horrifyingly partisan and biased, yet packaged as objective reporting.  What may be the most disturbing of all is that American society has, by and large, accepted this and drives it to new extremes.  Even in this blatantly fictitious, inflammatory article there were a significant number of comments that supported the author’s point of view, that Confederate soldiers were, in every way excluding technology, identical to radical Muslim terrorists.

Just as in any war, the “right” and “wrong” is determined by the winners.  Had the Confederacy prevailed, we wouldn’t even refer to this particular conflict as a Civil war.  Instead, it would have been the war of Confederate independence, the triumph of states’ rights over an exploitative federal system.  And I personally do not believe that slavery would have lasted much longer in the south, even given this alternate outcome.  I also believe that we are a stronger nation due to our federal union.  I am glad that we are fifty United States of America, and that slavery was ended sooner than would have happened otherwise.

But that does not detract from the fact that these Confederate soldiers were not fighting to harm the citizens of the Union.  They were not trying to destroy, rather they were fighting to protect their families and their way of life.  It is not difficult to argue that the South has yet to fully recover from the Civil War and the economic changes that were implemented afterward.  How can we fault anyone for fighting for such a cause?

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