I recently watched Ken Burns’ incomparable 1990 documentary series, “The Civil War.” I won’t spend a lot of time extolling its many virtues—as documentary, as American history, as unparalleled storytelling, as explanation for the causes-and-consequences of many societal issues with which we still wrestle, more than 150 years after that violent struggle began—other than to say it is possibly the best dozen-plus-hours you could spend in front of the television (and this coming from a man who owns all 86-hours of “The Sopranos”).

One of the interesting consequences of that most bloody of all American conflicts that was addressed by the series, and by many of the historians who lent their expertise and knowledge to its production, is the literary and intellectual movement that developed in the Southern states in the years immediately following the Civil War’s 1865 conclusion.

As a movement, the so-called “Lost Cause” had a generally successful impact, over a roughly 80-year period, in reconciling the members of the South’s traditional white society to the military defeat of the Confederacy.

Authors, poets, artists, historians, and other intellectuals who contributed to the Lost Cause portrayed the Confederacy’s secession from the Union as a noble crusade for states’ rights (against a power-hungry federal government backed by industrial and banking interests) and a “lost way of life,” as described by Margaret Mitchell, the author of one of the most enduring examples of Lost Cause literature and its impact on American culture, “Gone With the Wind.”

The movement also portrayed many Confederate leaders—and particularly the well-loved military hero Robert E. Lee—as archetypal examples of chivalry and honor (like knights of old) who were beaten by the Union because of the North’s crushing military might and industrial power, rather than through virtue, personal bravery, or skill.

In Mitchell’s 1936 book, slavery, when it is portrayed at all, is presented (like other so-called “Southern plantation fiction” of that and earlier periods) from the point-of-view and through the values of the slaveholding class, rendering an image of slaves as happy and docile.

The slaves depicted in “Gone With the Wind” are loyal servants, like Mammy, Prissy, and Uncle Peter, who stay on with their masters even after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 set them free.

As can be seen in the 1939 film version of “Gone With the Wind,” adherents to the Lost Cause condemned the Northern-compelled Reconstruction that followed the war, seeing it as a form of cultural genocide devised by vengeful Northern lawmakers and self-serving business interests aimed on destroying the South’s traditional way of life.

In fact, the almost complete opposite was true. Prior to the Civil War, abolitionists, free state and territory supporters, Northern journalists, and independent commentators referred to what was known as the “Slave Power” (or sometimes “Slaveocracy”) to describe the out-sized influence and political power of the slaveholding states and the Southern aristocracy that dominated them.

This cabal of rich cotton and other agricultural planters and their sympathetic allies in Congress (and often the White House) conspired to use unfortunate Constitutional guarantees made by the Founders, along with pro-slavery laws (such as the Fugitive Slave Act), and Supreme Court rulings like the despicable Dred Scott Decision (to say nothing of the largely pro-slavery justices themselves) to force every American to become a co-conspirator in that vile institution.

After the Southern defeat, the myth of the Lost Cause gave former slaveholders and supporters of bigotry a form of cover, plus a chance to revise the history. Thus former Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, one of the loudest advocates of the Lost Cause lie, would claim when the war began that slavery was the “cornerstone of the Confederacy,” while after the war he wrote that states’ rights, not slavery, prompted the South to rebel.

In fact, states’ rights was—at best—a secondary concern to the Slave Power, with the pro-slavery states arguing before they seceded that the U.S. Constitution—a federal document—constrained the national government from interfering with slavery in any state. After they seceded, they decided that the new Confederacy’s Constitution would impose a federal prohibition of any state interfering with their federally-protected institution. This speaks volumes to the notion that slavery, and not any peripheral concerns about states’ rights, is what really lay at the heart of their argument, and that of their Lost Cause apologists.

The arguments and ideologies that sustained the Slave Power and the later Lost Cause have strong parallels to those employed by the defenders of so-called traditional marriage. They can rant and rave about the religious antecedents that helped shape society’s idea of what marriage means, but as Rev. Durrell Watkins of Sunshine Cathedral notes in his Q-POINT piece on the following page, the Bible has been used to justify all sorts of things—including slavery, and polygamy—but in the end, the Good Book, like the law, like the history books, and like Supreme Court rulings, was and is written by men.

Let’s hope that homophobia—cloaked in the guise of tradition, religion, conservatism, and that old bugbear, states’ rights—is just another soon-to-be Lost Cause.