If an organization makes that kind of statement, should a Virginia General Assemblyman continue to be a leader of the organization? Even if he is a Republican?

Everybody knew that the Republican Party had a history of racism, and associating with racists, long before Kanye West said that George Bush didn't care about black people. It's just that usually they're more circumspect about it than the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, who included the title quote in one of their newsletters, have been known to be. In another, they said that the United States was created "for white people."

Still, the above statements were made a long time ago. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-partisan civil rights group, the Sons of Confederate Veterans reformed itself in 1980's, switched to a focus on Confederate history, and cut its official ties with the Klu Klux Klan.  

Small problem, they weren't too successful at it. More recently, prominent members of the group have been heard saying things like this:

"Black Katrina victims are "pestilent vermin.""These leeches will go on to pollute the communities [where] they're relocated" - statement made in 2005 by a Sons of Confederate Veterans President.

"We seek a return to ... a majority European-derived society." Statement made in 2000 by a Sons of Confederate Veterans Executive Council Member

As the SPLC says of the SCV 2006 elections, a four year fight between radical racist factions and moderates ended with wins for racists with ties to other well known white supremacist groups. From their own mouths:

... "We should all [now] resolve to work to defeat the Marxist Socialists that are waging war on Southern culture," Ed Butler, a newly elected leader of the Army of Tennessee [a division of the SCV], exulted after his victory. The League of South, a neo-Confederate hate group sympathetic to the radicals, was pleased, too, enthusing on its website that "The Sons of Confederate Veterans have endorsed a radical direction." ...

The national group's latest weekly news analysis unapolagetically points to a site where Pastor Weaver teaches the truth about the Confederate flag, which you can stream live from the web or read part of it here. It's a fascinating tutorial on the battle flag of the Confederacy and how it isn't a racist flag because the KKK also flies the Stars and Stripes. In a speech that sounds like any typical Republican stump speech, minus the stuff about Southern history, we learn that attacking the Confederate flag is to attack the truth and Jesus Christ, and it means you hate God.

Weaver also quotes a W. Earl Douglas of Charleston, SC, deceased, who said, "If hate had been the prevailing emotion between the blacks and the whites in the South, then it is a safe bet that the Confederacy would never have been born. ... Fortunately, there was love, understanding, and compassion."

Wow! I did not know that, Pastor Weaver. I did not know that there wasn't any trouble between blacks and whites, not even in the 1960s, until the North came in and started stirring up trouble. "Slavery was only made an issue by the liberal revisionists," and the real slavery is the intrusion of the federal government into the lives of freedom-loving Southerners. How instructive.

Everybody gets what that means. If you're not a white supremacist, you understand that it's a perniciously racist lie. Just like everybody understands that saying, "When a negro learns to read, he ceases to work," is racist, plain and simple. We don't have to have a big teach-in and discussion about it.

So why does Virginia, the state that decided to reject George "Macaca" Allen as a Senator, have Joe T. May, self-proclaimed treasurer of his Sons of the Confederate Veterans chapter, representing their 33rd District in the State Assembly?

To quote the Southern Poverty Law Center article again, as a result of this white supremacist takeover, "... discouraged moderates continued to trickle out of the SCV, as they have for several years. "Our convention committee presided over the funeral of what we all once thought of as the SCV," lamented the commander of the New Orleans SCV "camp," or chapter, that hosted the convention. "The SCV that we knew was dumped as a rotting carcass in a dung heap." ..."

If non-racists are leaving SCV, and Delegate May isn't racist, why is he still there? Still with a group that promotes lies about how happy blacks were under slavery? If Delegate May does not believe that black people are vermin, why not leave?