Toward the end of an 13-hour Confederate flag debate, Jenny Horne, an attorney and Republican member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, finally stepped up to the podium and delivered words so raw and impassioned they immediately went viral on the Internet.
“I cannot believe that we do not have the heart in this body to do something meaningful such as take a symbol of hate off these grounds on Friday,” Horne said, shouting through tears. “For the widow of Senator Pinckney and his two young daughters, that would be adding insult to injury.”
“The real issue is that that flag is a symbol of hate and it’s on a public ground where people, the entire state, they own that state house,” she continued. “That is public property. And to me, if that flag offends a percentage of our citizenry, including the people in Charleston, then we owed it to them to act in accordance with the Senate to take it down in a unified fashion.”
She said. “We’re not fighting the Civil War anymore."
Horne is a descendant of Jefferson Davis.
At www.washingtonpost.com
