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Even if your calendar wasn't working, you could tell that this is an election year because the Flag Protection Amendment gets taken seriously in Congress.
To give credit where credit is due, let me report that all four Colorado Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives were among the sponsors of H.J. Resolution 54, which proposed this amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
The Congress shall have power to prohibit the
physical desecration of the flag of the United
States.
Three of these Colorado congressmen -- Scott McInnis, Bob Shaffer, Joel Hefley -- can thus position themselves this fall as Protectors of Our Flag, which must mean that anyone who runs against one of them is an Attacker of Our Flag, and the political processes of the Republic will continue as usual, thus demonstrating the essential stability of our form of government.
With that comforting thought in mind, we can examine flag protection in more depth.
The courts have held that burning a flag is a political statement, and is thereby protected under the First Amendment as a form of political expression.
While there's some superficial logic to this, it also demonstrates that our courts are quite inconsistent.
Suppose I chose to make a political statement
by
burning hemp leaves at a rally on the steps of the state
capitol. It seems to me that if combustion is a personal
political statement, then it should be my decision as to
what I ignite -- it would all be protected as free
speech.
But I'd get arrested for torching those hemp leaves (or tobacco leaves in some of our purer jurisdictions), whereas the courts say that you or I can burn U.S. flags. If flames and embers are political statements, then they all deserve protection. If not, why can't the flag get the same protection against burning as plant leaves get?
Perhaps there is some distinction that has escaped me,
but as someone who spent many youthful hours in a Baptist
Sunday school, I am also troubled by the word
desecration.
To say that the flag can be desecrated
by some
act is to say that the flag was sacred
before that
action occurred.
In Sunday School, we were taught that no man-made objects could be sacred to good Christians -- such objects were graven images, and that to imbue them with sacred character was to commit the sin of idolatry.
And it was even worse if the item was connected with a government -- it was like the Roman caesars declaring themselves gods, and one reason behind the collapse of that evil empire.
So it's hard for me to understand how any professing Christian could support the Flag Protection Amendment -- it smacks of idolatry and worse.
I'd love to see the Christian Coalition take this as seriously as it takes only one of the arcane prohibitions in Leviticus. (The fundamentalists get excited about homosexuality, but never seem to care about eating shellfish, collecting interest, or wearing shirts made of more than one kind of cloth).
Further, I can't imagine how flag protection would be
enforced. Every day I toss out envelopes with canceled
stamps that go to the county landfill, where they get a
treatment that would be desecration
for a flag.
Many of those stamps have flags on them. Am I supposed to
preserve them under glass, while the Postal Service
carefully avoids defacing them with cancellations?
Stamps can be changed, I suppose, but what about those flag lapel pins that politicians wear? That always strikes me as a way to take something that should belong to all Americans, our flag, and put it to use for partisan purposes to imply that political opponents are traitors, rather than merely people with a different notions of the role of government.
If the amendment passes, then perhaps Congress can
define a flag
as something that goes up a flagpole.
Then suppose some clever protester constructed a 51-star
flag which closely resembled the current 50-star version,
and then burnt it.
This would outrage many people who believed that the
Flag Protection Amendment would protect the national symbol
from such desecration
-- but would it be
illegal?
What of all the commercial uses of the flag, such as those huge banners that draw attention to some used-car lots? Those always strike me as a gross perversion of what the flag is supposed to stand for, and such uses of the flag offends me, but I doubt the Flag Protection Amendment would do much good.
I can't see any reason to agree with the courts that burning a flag is a political statement, since it is guaranteed to alienate most of your audience, and presumably the idea behind political statements is to get support for your position.
But it seems increasingly obvious that amending the
constitution to prohibit flag desecration
is a
political statement -- and nothing else.
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