The law as currently written does not require the death be while in military service, only that the person “died in the service of the United States.” That would include people like the State Department staff recently killed in Libya, and even people like the security contractors killed in Iraq.
We get it. You don’t care what the US government says Memorial Day means, even though the day is set aside to remember those who died in service of that government and the ideas behind it.
That’s not my assertion, mine is that it was created to honor war dead. President Johnson evidently wanted it to include a prayer for peace. Good for him.
It was in existence, as a state holiday. In some states, it included, and still includes, honoring Confederate war dead.
To clarify: it was created to honor Civil War dead; Union dead in the North as Decoration Day, Confederate Dead in the South as Confederate Memorial Day. Over time, it broadened to include other war dead. Then, it became a national holiday, and then was broadened further to include any death in service to the U.S.
Memorial Day has nothing to do with honoring Confederate soldiers. It never has and never will. The holiday known as Memorial Day, as is made clear in the Presidential Proclamation I cited earlier, is to honor people who died in service to the United States.
Why don’t you provide a cite that explicitly shows that the holiday has anything to do with honoring Confederate soldiers? Because you cannot because it does not.
And it’s made clear in the PP that it’s all about honoring people who died in service to our country.
As the Confederate soldiers did not die in service to our country, they are not among those we honor. Any attempt to do so is simply an attempt to hijack the holiday, similar to claiming that Christmas is the day people celebrate the birth of Jesus and the birth of the People’s Republic of China.
I already did. The VA cite covers the history of the holiday quite well, including how it originated as separate, regional holidays in the North and South. I’m sorry if that idea bothers you, but it is part of the factual origin of the holiday that, much later, became a federal holiday.
You’re reading a lot into Johnson’s proclamation that isn’t there. He says:
As it happens, for some people, “the memory of brave men who have bourne our colors in war” includes Confederates. This is fully in the spirit of Johnson’s proclamation.
You were insisting that Memorial Day was just Decoration Day renamed. It’s not. It’s the descendant of both the Northern and the Southern traditions. The Southern one was even first, by 10 whole days.
I think it’s worth taking a step back and asking what it does or does not mean for confederate soldiers to “count”. Are there towns which read a roll call of dead soldiers from that town? If so, and if it’s just a list of names, I would have zero problem with those names including dead confederate soldiers, particularly if it was just names, not “died in service to the noble cause of the Confederacy” or something like that.
I mean, you’re certainly not going to walk up to each individual person and say “OK, who are you remembering… great grand pappy who fought for Georgia? STOP IT! YOU ARE FORBIDDEN!!!”
I think more than anything else, the reason to let people honor the memory of confederate soldiers comes down to this: don’t be a dick. We won, they lost. Not only did their ancestors die, their ancestors died in a losing war supporting a cause that is now generally viewed as totally evil. Do we also have to be dicks about it and tell them their ancestors, individually, aren’t worthy of veneration?
People often accuse Southerners of continuing to fight the Civil War, but honestly in all my years here I’ve never heard such unresolved animosity as I have heard from the anti-Confederates in this thread. And to reiterate, I’m a born and raised Yankee.
Every man who died on both sides of the war was someone’s son. They were brothers and husbands and fathers who were not, as individuals, fighting for the sake of committing atrocities or even for the sake of holding on to the institution of slavery – the vast majority of them never owned a slave in their lives. They were fighting for their home and way of life against what they were taught and believed were invading aggressors.
We can’t impose 21st century morality on 19th century laborers who saw Union soldiers invading Virginia and Georgia and Tennessee and chose to fought for their families and community. They suffered and died just as well and bravely as the Union soldiers did.
It’s been 150 years and the Union won. We can afford to be a little magnanimous about it at this point.
Not being venerated on a day reserved for remembrance of American soldiers =/= not worthy of veneration. Nobody is saying there can’t be a CSA Memorial Day or whatever. It’s just bizarre that anyone would enumerate traitors among honored war dead.
Of course they did. That’s not the point: the point was they were rebelling against the United States. If Alabama wants to have its own holiday, that’s entirely right and proper, but that’s it’s own lookout.
I’d wager that several folks who’ve posted in this thread would have a serious problem with a Confederate Memorial Day (which several states still have).
Fair enough, though in practice objections to that sort of thing are never to the simple act of remembering war dead. It’s about the revisionism that invariably accompanies that sort of thing.
I don’t think you get to be venerated (in the US) for taking up arms against the US Army. I’m sorry for their loss, and all that, but many American soldiers were killed by these folks. I’m over the war, and don’t hate the South, but I don’t think we should have a federal holiday that honors the CSA fallen. I don’t we need a holiday to mock them, or hate them, or otherwise show disrespect. As many have said, they’re were often brave and well intentioned (or at least, doing what many of us would have done in their place and time). If Memorial Day is about honoring those who died in service of our country, however, confederate solders are excluded by definition.
Separate holidays only perpetuate the division between the North and the South. Seriously, after a century and a half I’m ready to move on. Good men, and bad men, fought on both sides. They both contributed to the nation we know. I respect the Confederate soldiers as much as the Union soldiers for their sacrifice.
Remember that before the war, most of the North was perfectly fine with slavery continuing down in the South. The whole country was complicit. Claiming moral superiority now is self-serving revisionism.
My whole life has experienced a constant barrage of historical revisionism and idealization of the Confederacy. So, at this point in history, no. No, we can’t afford even a smidgen of concession to the confederacy. It needs to be rejected unequivocally as something that no one should take pride in, recall fondly, idealize, romanticize, or venerate. The memory of the confederacy needs to be fucked anally with a rusty flag pole and left to die in a crack alley.
I’m sorry, this is just a nonsense question. Congress decided to write a law defining the meaning of Memorial Day, and did so. By any reasonable interpretation, that language of that law excludes memorializing people who died fighting against the United States. If you can find any other statutory language that conflicts with this, from earlier or later, please show us.
Let me restate my earlier comment in the form of a question. **Is the federal statute defining the meaning of Memorial Day irrelevant (in your eyes) to who deserves to be memorialized on that day? **
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