Gov. Bob McDonnell made a foolish political calculation this week in resurrecting Confederate History Month from the ash heap of Virginia history, and rednecks everywhere are being tarnished as a result.

Every time Southerners get nostalgic about the way things were before the Civil War, people who rightly want to condemn the bigotry of the past against blacks engage in bigotry of their own. Yesterday it happened at The Huffington Post, where commentator Charles Ellison accused McDonnell of “Keeping It Redneck” by proclaiming April as Confederate History Month without also condemning the slavery of the Confederacy.

Ellison was right to criticize McDonnell. Virginia hasn’t recognized Confederate History Month in eight years, and by reviving it to score political points, he reopened a debate that should be closed by now. But his decision was not an “attempt to keep it redneck,” a phrase that Ellison subtly equated with racism, because “redneck” is not a synonym for “racist,” and celebrating Southern history is not necessarily racist.

McDonnell could have charted the better course Ed Morrissey described at Hot Air:

As a history buff myself, I agree that it’s important to study history, but that doesn’t require a Confederacy Appreciation Month, which is what this sounds like. McDonnell could have broadened the perspective to a Civil War History Month, which would have allowed for all of the issues in the nation’s only armed rebellion to be studied. This approach seems needlessly provocative and almost guaranteed to create problems for Republicans in Virginia and across the country.

Unfortunately, McDonnell gave Ellison an opening to perpetuate an intellectually lazy redneck stereotype before eventually backpedaling on the proclamation.

Hopefully he and future leaders of Virginia have learned this valuable lesson:

Proclaiming Confederate History Month, much less after it had ceased being customary, reopens old wounds while doing next to nothing to heal them. The classic Simpsons answer, “Slavery it is, sir!” is what people will remember about the war. And flying the Confederate flag and otherwise glorifying the war is simply offensive to most black Americans and quite a few others. And, as Hardy Jackson, as ardent a lover of the South as any man alive, taught me, it’s simply bad manners to go around hurting people’s feelings for no good reason.

Most rednecks have known it for awhile now.

We think like Jim Geraghty of The Campaign Spot, a former colleague of mine: “When it comes to the problems facing Virginia, I’d rank insufficient commemoration of Confederate History Month somewhere between 1861st and 1865th on the list.”

And we don’t align ourselves with misguided people who think Southerners should call themselves “Confederate Southern Americans.”