Petaluma man removes Confederate flag after ‘making point’ about free speech

A Petaluma man who flew a Confederate flag on his east side property Wednesday has removed the symbol that many consider offensive and racially charged, saying he had made his point about freedom of speech.

On Thursday, the American flag flew above Travis Kilbourne’s Lassen Drive home. The 33-year-old building tradesman said he took down the Confederate flag Wednesday evening after sparking a conversation.

“Getting people talking about the First Amendment was my goal,” Kilbourne said Thursday morning. “I feel I made my point.”

The Confederate flag has become a lightning rod since a South Carolina man on June 17 shot and killed nine inside a Charleston church. Pictures of the suspected gunman draped in the Confederate flag and his racist online commentary have since emerged. Southern states have been debating whether to remove the Confederate flag, seen by many as a symbol of slavery, segregation and racism, from state capitols.

Kilbourne, who participates in Civil War reenactments as a Union soldier, said he does not condone racism. He said censoring historical symbols is a slippery slope.

“What if the next psycho wraps himself in an American flag?” he said. “What are we going to do then?”

Kilbourne said that he never intended to permanently display the Confederate flag, and he said he was not pressured to take it down. Some of his neighbors supported his flying of the flag, he said.

In online forums, including the Facebook page of the group Occupy Petaluma, many expressed their disapproval of Kilbourne’s Confederate flag.

“With Travis’s point of view, Jews should be flying the Nazi flag to remember, huh?” wrote former Petaluma City Councilwoman Tiffany Renee. “What a crock.”

In a letter stapled to a fence below his flagpole, Kilbourne elaborated on the thoughts he intended to provoke.

“Those of you who felt offended by the Confederate battle flag I displayed might want to consider getting the United States flag changed,” he wrote. “Millions of Native Americans were murdered, displaced and had their culture destroyed under the authority of the United States.”

He said that people could find something offensive about nearly anything.

“If we remove everything that someone finds offensive, there would be nothing left in the world,” he wrote. “Such a world would have no art, music, literature, history, entertainment, science, medicine, expression or anything meaningful. Is this the world you want?”

(Contact Matt Brown at matt.brown@arguscourier.com. On Twitter @MattBrownAC.)