No, it's part of our heritage and should be respected as a relic of the misguided, but genuinely held mindset of our Southern kith and kin of a bygone, and long-gone era.

The Stars & Stripes is the proud flag of the United States of America but as an interrogated nation with a common purpose and shared values we should not object for reasons of sanctimonious political grandstanding, to the harmless fluttering of the confederate flag on appropriate occasions.

Why should it be it was a Battle Flag carried by the South in a time of war but as the history has been twisted by American Left the mind numbed minions of the Left view it as Hate. Wasn't it the Democrats in the South that were carrying the Battle Flag they are so opposed to now ?

There is a big problem with using the word should in this context. Saying the Confederate flag should be considered to be anti-American is like saying the Jolly Roger should be interpreted as anti-American. They are both parts of our history, and they both spring from roots of independence and courage, tempered by a generous portion of ignobility in the American character.

There is nothing more American than mixing our virtues with our faults, moving on afterwards, learning to be better, and then redefining ourselves.

This brings up the fact that countries use flags as symbols because they are unspecific in their meanings. They mean the country, not a particular part of the country, not a particular event in the country's history, not a particular segment of the country's population. What national characteristics a flag symbolizes is mutable, and changes as the country changes. The same applies to the "Confederate" flag. In a sense, that makes this particular flag particularly American.

Actually, it was the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. It did not originally represent the Confederate States of America. Then for a while it did (long after the war). Now, for a huge number of people it represents variously Southern pride (not necessarily White Southern pride), courage, rebelliousness, rural working class culture, racism, or any combination of the bunch, depending on who you are.

None of those things are actually anti-American, regardless of whether or not we are proud of them all.

I currently live in the South, I am from the American West, so I have no personal investment or deep-rooted feelings about this issue.

What I do have a personal investment in is people not insisting their own narrow interpretation of a vague symbol, and then putting each other in little boxes based on it.

Ironically, the Confederate States represent the views of the founding fathers most accurately. The existence of modern America, effectively, was built on the notion of self-governance and the ability to live in a state that represented your concerns and values. By this, I'm referring to the, 'No Taxation Without Representation.' argument. The CSA embodied those values by rejecting an anti-slavery consensus in the North it did not agree with, and the rule of a leader it considered illegitimate. It's almost identical to the Thirteen Colonies and their war for independence in the 18th century. Moreover, the founding fathers were all known to keep slaves, and I'm fairly sure one of the founding fathers may have engaged in an affair with his slave. They clearly believed that Afro-Americans were subhuman, and probably wished the constitution to be interpreted in this light. Whilst I disagree with the core principles of the CSA, which were the continuation of slavery and discrimination against Black Americans, I can't help but see the parallels to the founding of America in their failed struggle for independence, and so I'd say, whether good or bad, the Confederates were not anti-american, but rather embodied the values that the nation had been founded on in the previous century.