True Desecration of the Flage is Censorship, Not Burning
July 11, 1999
This Op-ed ran in the Boston Herald on Sunday, July 11, 1999.
It was a sad sight: Congress desecrating the flag. But that is what the House did recently when it voted to amend the Constitution to deprive Americans of their First Amendment right to protest government wrongdoing by burning the flag.Now I happen to hold the flag in high regard. I always straighten small flags in cemeteries. I insist on folding large flags into triangles, and am always offended to see a flag left up, unilluminated after dark. You might say I am reverential toward Old Glory, but my reverence is not for the flag itself but for the good it represents. Unlike most members of Congress, I don't believe in worshiping the flag or any other graven image.
I also take the Constitution seriously. I don't believe in changing it for light and transient reasons. We should think especially long and hard before we undermine the basic principle of its First Amendment, which is freedom for expressions the majority hates. Unfortunately, that's what this new proposed amendment does. Flag-burning is an especially provocative form of protest. House members would make this form of protest a crime.
Moreover, flag-burning can—in some circumstances—be patriotic.
The flag that graced my father's casket is displayed in our home in honor of his service during World War II. I honor the sacrifices of his generation, but I would not punish someone for burning a flag to protest the internment of 110,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans during that war. Such a protest would have been highly patriotic.
But flag desecration need not be patriotic. It can be despicable and still merit constitutional protection. For example, I don't think it would be patriotic to raise the Confederate flag above Old Glory, thereby celebrating those who took up arms against the Union to preserve slavery. But I wouldn't make the expression of such opinion a crime.
The same goes for people who wear representations of the flag on beach towels or even on their underwear. Disrespectful? Yes. Criminal? No.
As an Army captain in 1967, I did not appreciate the disrespect that anti-war protesters sometimes expressed for my uniform, but I never thought that they should be jailed for their opinions.
Nor was I so offended that I could not understand what they were protesting. I, too, did not appreciate the politicians who drafted members of my generation to die in Vietnam. Many of those politicians knew that the war could not be won but were too cowardly to stop it.
The cowardice and hypocrisy of congressmen who wrap themselves in the flag, when they should be defending what it represents, is far worse than the burning of an occasional flag to protest what politicians do.
By voting to turn a political symbol into a sacred object, members of the House have also committed blasphemy. Under their Constitution, religious symbols, like the Christian cross, could still be treated with disrespect. The only symbol they would place above all reproach is the nation's flag.
This amendment also demeans the flag by trivializing the Constitution. And nothing could be more trivial than authorizing Congress to ban flag-burning, when such a law could be easily evaded by the addition of a star or the change of a color.
Everyone in Congress knows this. The flag-burning amendment will be a war upon the body politic, a blasphemy to those who worship God and a fraud upon naive citizens who think that such a ban will protect their flag from disrespect.
Permanent link to this story: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/news/stories/5683094
