Nothing is being “banned.” If the government of a state starts telling people they cannot fly a confederate flag, I’ll be right there with the rednecks protesting.
Amazon, et al., have been morally persuaded to stop carrying CF merchandise. The system works! Anyway, would you say the same thing about, say, non-dolphin-safe tuna? That people should be free to buy it and that the correct thing to do is to morally persuade them to stop? Or is Kroger free to stop carrying it if it thinks its customers would object?
Nobody’s stopping anybody from manufacturing confederate flags, uniforms, belt buckles, or confederate-themed beer cozies or anything else you want to manufacture.
I’m not arguing that Wal-Mart (or eBay or Amazon) must do anything. They can do what they want. This ain’t the USSR.
What I am saying is that banning items bearing a Confederate flag is a wrong-headed approach. (Here I am really thinking more of eBay and Amazon, where third-party sellers list items.) I think a better approach is moral suasion. The use of the Confederate flag has decreased dramatically in these parts over the decades, and that is not the result of any ban, but because more and more people are coming to see the flag as offensive. Moral suasion.
Bans, I think, lead to people getting their backs up, and that leads to backlash. So yeah, of course they can ban such items. I just don’t think it’s the best approach to the problem.
To me the “ban” is the end result of the “moral suasion” – companies decide, based on the opinions of their customers, that to sell such products is more damaging to them then not selling them, so they stop.
The government removing the flag from public property does not prevent anyone from flying the flag themselves, or slapping it on their bumper. It is not coercive. There is no attempt to control or inhibit the actions of others.
There is a coercive element at work when Amazon and eBay team up to deny people access to their sites. It is an attempt to restrict the sale of those items, by denying sellers access to the two biggest online outlets for third-party sales. That is fundamentally an attempt to control (and restrict) the behavior of others. And that is wrong-headed, in my view. It is the sort of thing that provokes an angry backlash.
Demonstrably top-down, FWIW. The customers haven’t had time for their collective opinion to turn the gears. Or were the customers as a collective cool with the Confederate flag two weeks ago? :dubious:
The whole response seems to be getting silly. Not having the flag flying over state property, sure, though I’d be happy to consider exceptions (memorials where the thing wasn’t done as ham-fistedly as in South Carolina.) Probably a good idea to change Mississippi’s state flag while we’re outraged. And sure, retailers are perfectly free not to sell or allow third parties to list such merchandise. But there have been calls to rename forts, remove statues, and generally remove all traces of the Confederacy from America. There might be people who are better known today and worthy of honor in Statuary Hall, for instance. But at least don’t act like removing a statue that few know about will actually do anything. The whole thing has quickly felt like it’s gone into major overreach mode on the left. And there’s the latest silliness of Apple removing Civil War games from their App Store because of the historically correct use of the flag in a strategy game.
It’s an attempt to control behavior, by foreclosing people from access to the websites that control virtually all third-party sales. If I am not a merchant, but an individual seller, how do I now sell my toy General Lee?
That is going to make people angry. It already has. When you are trying to persuade people, making them angry is not the way to go.
I really really don’t care if a bunch of idiots feel all spiteful and buy Confederate flags. I’m okay with racists outing themselves. If the stink is big enough, there are no excuses for anyone to claim it’s “heritage, not hate.” It’s a heritage of hate.