The headline on this article may suprise some, who were under the impression that the Sons of Confederate Veterans always were a group of racist loons. Well, they weren't. Up until about five years ago at least, when a decades-long campaign by right-wingers came to a head...if any of this sequence sounds vaguely familiar, read on.

Short version: since the takeover membership in the SCV has fallen off a cliff. In the last year alone, according to the just-released Intelligence Report Fall '07 from the superb Southern Poverty Law Center, dues-paying membership has fallen from around 30,000 to 18,600. The people I defended all those years, the ones who lived up to the motto "Heritage Not Hate," were derided as "Grannies" by the neofascists one too many times and walked away.

And the guy who orchestrated this takeover, while remaining as far back in the shadows as he could manage, one Kirk Lyons, is now finding that the charming folks he recruited into the SCV are the ones attacking him from the right. Heeee hee hee hee hee....

NASCAR is even involved in this. It's a little complicated but the SPLC link above does a great job of summing up the Recent Unpleasantness.

I am playing the world's tiniest violin in the direction of Black Mountain, NC.

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By way of background yes, there is a Sons of Union Veterans organization. They do superb work, just as the SCV used to before the hijacking, in historic preservation of Civil War sites, cemeteries, monuments and land. Both groups are supposed to be made up of those with provable genealogical descent from enlisted Civil War soldiers but have long had "associate memberships" for those without such connections. No you don't have to wear itchy wool uniforms, eat hardtack, carry a musket or go to battle reenactments to belong to either group.