Let’s start at a place where consensus is easy: No one that I know of is arguing that anyone should be prohibited from displaying the South’s most familiar icon — the Confederate battle flag — on his person or his private property or even in public locations, such as the bumper of his car or as a tattoo on the skin of his forearm.

Not every country has this sort of freedom. In Germany, you can be sent to prison for three years for displaying a swastika. Our freedom of speech, including symbolic speech, is a splendid national attribute. So, good for us.

Here’s a second proposition, slightly more controversial: Because potential for offense is high, the battle flag shouldn’t be displayed anywhere it could be understood to enjoy the sanction of the government we hold in common. Thus, the South Carolina legislature should remove the flag from its capitol grounds immediately.

Thus, on June 18 the Supreme Court sustained the right of the state of Texas to reject a request by the Sons of Confederate Veterans to display the battle flag on a Texas license plate. On June 23, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe ordered the removal of the Confederate battle flag from Virginia license plates.

And in Mississippi, the House Speaker and the state’s two U.S. senators have called for the deletion of the image of the battle flag from the state flag.

Some still strongly oppose the removal of the battle flag from government-sanctioned venues, but surely this is an idea whose time has come. A rapidly growing consensus appears to hold that the essential symbol of a 150-year-old armed rebellion against the United States in support of a bad cause, a symbol that was subsequently exploited by segregationists, the Ku Klux Klan, civil-rights resisters and racists, should finally be banished from any location that has the appearance of government approval.

But then things get complicated. A week after the massacre in Charleston, the statues of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnston, prominent on the South Mall at the University of Texas at Austin, were vandalized, spray-painted with slogans like “Black Lives Matter.”

Concerns about the commemoration of these Confederates have roiled on campus for a number of years. In March, the student government association adopted a resolution demanding the removal of Davis’s statue to a museum, and last week at least 2,300 people signed an online petition demanding its banishment from the campus.

Now we’re in difficult territory. What do we do about all of the towns, streets, parks, schools, army bases and other public entities named in honor of famous Confederates? Where would a purge of their commemorations end?

In fact, on June 26, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer wonders if we should dig up the remains of several hundred Confederate soldiers who are buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

But common sense and evenhandedness are called for. A flag isn’t a statue. You can wrap yourself in a flag or rally around it or use it to lead a parade. And it can be dangerous because its symbolism can easily become more powerful than the cause it originally represented.

The Confederate battle flag served church shooter Dylann Roof well as a convenient point of focus, an object that helped him consolidate his hatred and prejudice. I suspect that Roof wholeheartedly embraced the worst that the battle flag implies while knowing very little about the Confederacy.

It’s the ignorance that should worry us. The Confederates expended considerable courage and blood in the service of a dishonorable cause. They don’t deserve commemoration, but they are still a part of our national fabric. And, like it or not, they are an apt reminder of what we are capable of and a warning to do better. I’d rather remember, study and understand that ugly period of our history than try to expunge it.

Besides if we renamed all of the streets that commemorate Confederates, slaveholders, racists, Indian-killers, murderers, thieves, liars, misogynists, adulterers, wife-beaters, child-abusers and fornicators, we’d have to get by with Avenue B and 10th Street.