I would argue that relegating an entire group of human beings to "livestock" status is a form of hate, no matter how "well" you take care of them. It's not the same sort of hate as driving around in bedsheets waving a rebel flag and burning crosses in front yards is, but you'd have a very hard time convincing me that enslaving someone is an example of how much you care for them.

 

The rebel flag was not about overt hate in the 1860's. It was about treason. Hate entered the picture once the KKK started riding around burning crosses and lynching black people, and that's become its primary meaning to society today. Honestly, the rebel flag should have been removed from state flags and government property long ago and relegated to museums and the front lawns of "proud southerners" long ago for its original Civil War meaning alone. That governments continue to fly it 50 years after the Civil Rights movement is an insult to the people who were enslaved under it, and who were persecuted, sometimes murdered, by people waving it. I'll go back to the swastika again, because like it or not, that is a perfectly valid example of a symbol that was twisted from its original meaning into a symbol of utter hate, and one that very few (if any) countries in the western world would dare run up a flagpole. The difference is that the swastika was a symbol of good fortune. The rebel flag was a banner flown by traitors.

 

We shouldn't forget history, and the Civil War should be taught in textbooks for what it is: a failed rebellion fought over numerous causes, with the primary issue, and the one most frequently and most prominently cited in articles of secession, being the right of states to authorize slavery.

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