In a March 8, 2013 editorial, the Los Angeles Times discussed a recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center about the increase in “patriot” groups. IREHR applauds the report and its discussion.  But the Los Angeles Times opinion writers make the most egregious of mistakes when they write: “What can be done to reverse this tide of belligerent ignorance? Not much.”

Recognizing the First Amendment rights of racist, anti-Semites and bigots—whether they be known as militias, patriots, Tea Partiers or Ku Klux Klansmen—is not a ticket to surrendering our own First Amendment rights to speak out and peaceably assemble.  Over the decades, in hundreds of communities and states, religious leaders, community-based organizations and youth and subculture groupings have used their own First Amendment rights.

Based on the uttering of one self-identified “Exalted Cyclops,” a mass of television, internet, and print reporters have declared that Klansmen will be coming to Memphis, Tennessee and protest the renaming of several Confederate memorials in that city.  The number “5,000” is usually floated along with this “fact.”

Remember the Civil War?  It officially started in South Carolina at Fort Sumter.  While it was being fought, and hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers were dying due to Confederate bullets and ammo, President Lincoln had a standing offer of amnesty to Confederates.  All the person had to do was cease hostility and swear an oath of loyalty to the United States of America.  Shortly after Lincoln was assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer, on May 29, 1865, President Johnson offered a similar amnesty to all Confederates, except ex-officers in the rebel army, and a small number of large property owners.  They had a slight longer route back to citizenship.  That was an amnesty for open rebellion.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), in a House Judiciary Committee hearing on immigration reform, said, “This is not our country’s first foray into amnesty,” according to the New York Times.  He worried, however, about “respect for the rule of law” if undocumented immigrants became citizens.

Gowdy was probably not talking then about the post-Civil War amnesty.  He should remember the former Confederates lack of respect for the rule of law and their violent abrogation of the Constitutional rights to equality before the law and the right to vote.  They simply massacred black men who were trying to vote.  They rose up in the Ku Klux Klan to restore white supremacy.  I guess it is in bad taste for some South Carolinians to remember all that when talking about amnesty. 

Other South Carolinians, of course, remember it all too well.  Others remember Gowdy’s support for the Tea Party movement and defense of same, all while trying to deny that he is a congressman from the Tea Parties.

The Spartanburg Tea Party remembers Rep. Gowdy, however.  They think he is “awesome.”