A Virginia state senator wants the Confederate flag to be reinstated on government-issued license plates after the state's Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, ordered the flag removed earlier this year. A bill filed by Sen. Charles W. Carrico, Sr., a Republican from Southwest Virginia, would allow the Sons of Confederate Veterans to put the flag on the organization's specialty license plate.
"I think it goes too far to ban it," Carrico said in an interview with the Richmond Times-Dispatch. "I'm not a racist, but I believe we learn from our mistakes and our accomplishments and if we start erasing history with this, where do we stop?"
In June, McAuliffe said that the state would phase out the license plate that features the Confederate flag.
"Although the battle flag is not flown here on Capitol Square, it has been the subject of considerable controversy, and it divides many of our people," McAuliffe said at the time, The Washington Post reported. "Even its display on state-issued license tags is, in my view, unnecessarily divisive and hurtful to too many of our people."
"We certainly hope that the situation can be reversed," said Leonard Tracy Clary, the head of the Sons of Confederate Veterans Virginia division, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. "We feel like we've been discriminated against. Other organizations have been allowed to display their logo on the license plates. And we're not."
The move by McAuliffe followed the shooting deaths of nine members of a historic African American Church in Charleston, S.C., by Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white make who said he wanted "to start a race war." South Carolina removed the Confederate flag from the statehouse in July following intense public debate, according to The Wall Street Journal.
In Alabama on Wednesday, Democratic state legislator Alvin Holmes called on Gov. Robert Bentley to issue an executive order removing the Confederate flag from the patches on state trooper uniforms, according to ABC News. The Republican governor had the flag removed from statehouse grounds this summer.
