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Nothing ever goes away. We will soon return to heated debate on a constitutional amendment to allow state and federal governments to outlaw flag-burning.
The courts have held that burning a flag is a form of political expression, and thereby protected by the first amendment guarantee of freedom of speech. No matter how much we may abhor flag-burning, we apparently cannot make it illegal without amending the federal constitution.
As a frequent practitioner of political expression, I believe flag-burning is worse than stupid. If you're trying to get some message across, you don't want to alienate your potential audience -- you want them to listen.
Burning a flag will not get you a fair-minded audience
willing to consider your arguments about General Motors,
Gennifer Flowers, Guatemala or Gingrich. After all, many
Americans are idolaters when it comes to the stars and
stripes, and thus consider flag-burning an act of
desecration.
The term is instructive. To desecrate means to abuse
the sacredness of.
So if someone is desecrating
the flag by burning it, it means that the flag must be
sacred.
Given that we have freedom of religion in this country, people are perfectly free to believe that the American flag is sacred. I don't know what religion they follow, though; no good Christian could believe that any flag is in any sense holy or sacred, considering the harsh words the Bible has for graven images, idolatry and the like.
Anyway, there are millions of heathens who belong to the American Church of Old Glory, and if you're making a political statement, you want them to listen. They won't listen if you've just applied a lucifer match to the flag. They'll just get out the noose and the tar bucket.
Even if the courts have deemed otherwise, flag burning can't work as a form of political expression.
Further, why does the flag get singled out as the one item whose combustion is a political matter? If I were to stand at a rally and ignite hemp leaves, it might reasonably be interpreted as a political statement. But our courts would see otherwise, and hold that our governments have the power to prohibit certain combustions.
So why not just add the American flag to some federal schedule of controlled substances, and turn the whole thing over to the DEA? Why bother with amending the Constitution?
There are other ways that our existing regulatory structures could cope with the menace of flag-burners -- if flag-burners are not a menace yet, they will be once various Republicans get their presidential campaigns going.
We don't have a real threat from global communism, fighting Hollywood means an enemy with money and power, and denouncing welfare mothers is getting stale. So be prepared for propaganda about protecting yourself from the flag burners who are even now on the march toward your serene neighborhood of wholesome folks who don't watch the kind of movies that Phil Gramm used to finance.
To prevent this threat, couldn't we just amend the air-quality regulations?
Already local governments, at the behest of the federal EPA, exercise the power to tell you what you can burn (oxygenated no-lead gasoline, rather than leaded super premium) and when (no wood fires on certain winter nights).
So the Republican flag-protectors could just amend the Clean Air Act to include flag materials in the list of substances that you can't burn without getting a lot of permits from bureaucrats, who can then check to insure that no flags abide among the cloth to be incinerated.
But then again, most of these would-be flag-protectors oppose clean-air laws as yet another example of government run amok, getting too big and too intrusive. So that approach is likely doomed.
However, if you're opposed to the big and intrusive government we already have, just thing how much worse things will get if they try to enforce a flag-protection amendment.
For instance, during the winter, I often deposit old
envelopes into our wood-burning kitchen stove. Many of
these envelopes bear canceled postage stamps, most recently
that Old Glory G
stamp.
Am I thereby desecrating
the flag? Or was it
already desecrated
when the flag was defaced by
government employees who operate the canceling machines at
the post office?
What are my alternatives? Toss the envelope into the
trash, and the flag will be buried in a landfill, a fate
that could qualify as desecration.
Or perhaps a good
citizen in the future will carefully steam the stamps off
envelopes before tossing the paper; the flag stamps would
be preserved in a suitable household shrine.
To insure that no one is desecrating the flag,
we'd need thousands, perhaps millions, more police.
Further, generations of lawyers would be able to retire in
leisure on the proceeds of the litigation that a
flag-protection amendment would certainly generate as
society grappled with definitions of what's a flag and what
isn't.
It seems obvious that an occasional idiot flag-burner is a small price to pay for avoiding the horrors of bigger government with more cops and richer lawyers, but then again, I'm not seeking the Republican nomination for the presidency.
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