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This Op-ed ran in the Boston Herald
on Sunday, July 11, 1999.
TRUE DESECRATION OF THE FLAG IS CENSORSHIP, NOT BURNING
By Christopher H. Pyle
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.
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