You are being willfully obtuse. You are ignoring, or running from real history if you prefer, the history of the US of A which had yet to do anything to outlaw slavery before the War of Northern Aggression all the way up through December 6, 1865 when the 13th Amendment was ratified. Your abysmal grasp of history likely precludes you from knowing that ratification came no less than eight months after Lee's surrender at Appomattox. During those eight months, KY, MO, MD and DE remained exempted from Lincoln's unconstitutional Emancipation Proclamation, removing even the phony pretense of the Union having done anything to outlaw slavery before or during the entirety of the War of Northern Aggression, or for the interim eight months before the 13A was ratified.
The US Flag was just as "racist" as the actual CSA Flag, which was never the Confederate Battle Flag.
The Constitution which the US Flag was, and ostensibly still is, emblematic of, also preserved slavery right up until the 13th Amendment was ratified.
Several Acts of Congress that acknowledge and preserve for perpetuity the status of CSA soldiers as veterans, equal in every conceivable regard to Union soldiers from the same conflict or any vet from any other conflict in this country's history, contradict your slander that they were "traitors."
And it is clearly you who runs from history when you can't even answer a perfect and direct analogy to the Founders and Revolutionary War vets who were traitors to Great Britain. Is the Founding of this country any less valid because of the presence of traitors in its leadership and armies? Is it the presence of those traitors that makes it illegitimate, or the incorporation and legitimization of slavery in its founding documents that makes it so? Or a combination thereof? Whatever, your selective and gymnastic romp through history that you're using to justify and rationalize your bigotry and slander against today's Southerners is no less disgusting than anything any Confederate or Union soldier ever did in defense of his homeland. The only difference is that any of them on either side were being intellectually honest about the reasons they fought. You're just a plain ol' hateful bigot, which likely has as much to do with the fact that the South remains mostly Christian as it does with anything that inspired this region of the country's ancestors to participate in the War of Northern Aggression.
Blues