A $5.3 million shrine to a $52 nylon flag? Seriously?

CINDI ROSS SCOPPE

... It never made any sense to me to give the white-glove treatment to the $52 off-the-rack nylon replica of a Confederate flag that happened to be the one flying at the time the Legislature agreed to remove it from the State House grounds. It never made sense to make ceremony of handing it off to South Carolina’s official keeper of things Confederate. Or to house it in a special container in a locked, alarmed, climate-controlled room while a special committee decides how to comply with the law that requires the flag that flew on the State House grounds for a total of 14 days to be given “appropriate display.”

But most of the lawmakers who have fond feelings about the flag agreed in good faith to remove it from its inappropriate place of honor on South Carolina’s front lawn in return for that special to-be-determined “appropriate display.” So those of us who did not have fond feelings about it need to act with equally good faith as we approach the time to remove the flag from its acid-free tissue paper inside its white, acid-free textile storage box and put it on display.

As an act of good faith, I think it would be appropriate for the taxpayers to buy the display case.

What is not appropriate is a $5.3 million shrine that a consultant dreamed up for the elaborate display of the flag and all sorts of other things Confederate that no one had seen any need to display up to this point. In a state that has slashed state funding for the entire State Museum by 40 percent since 2007. It’s an idea that reaches past appropriate all the way over to worship, as though this cheap piece of nylon were the Confederate Shroud of Turin ...

http://www.thestate.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/cindi-ross-scoppe/article50909120.html