Flag Burning Amendment Heating Up?
This is really happening? I swear I’m living in bizarro world. We have so many important things to worry about and now we’re going to criminalize an expression of free speech. Amazing.
I didn’t join the Army to defend a piece of cloth; I joined the Army to defend what that piece of cloth represents. And what it represents is individual freedom, including freedom of speech — which includes moronic things like burning flags.When protesters burn American flags — something that, by the way, happens exceedingly rarely in this country — they mostly demonstrate what idiots they are. But they also demonstrate the fundamental vitality of this country. In this country you can burn the flag and nobody will arrest you; that stark fact is part of what makes America a great nation.
Some people want to change that. They want to stomp all over the meaning of the flag in order to protect the physical structure of the flag. Which just makes the flag more worthy of burning, not less.
And by the way, if burning a flag is illegal, then this should ABSOLUTELY be illegal too.
18 Responses to “Flag Burning Amendment Heating Up?”
My eyes! The goggles do nothing!
I think it would make more sense rip the first “and” from the Pledge of Allegience, to make the metaphor clearer. I think Sean Aqui says it best for the vast majority of INTELLIGENT AMREICANS.
Is it possible to have a Constitutional inconsistency, where two amendments are in direct contraidiction? That would be bad.
Years ago George H.W. Bush — “Bush 41″ ate a flag. His birthday cake was decorated like an American flag. He cut it up with a knife, and ate a piece of it.
How can any sensible law distinguish between destroying a flag by burning it or by eating it? It comes down to the state of mind of the person doing it — did he intend a message of contented patritoism, or alarmed patritoism?
The swimsuit model has nice basket!
Ok Holly, you’re going to have to explain “basket”? Is that like “package”?
From what I can see most of the people in favor of the Flag Burning Amendment aren’t all that crazy about the First Amendment in general.
it’ll never pass. they need the wedge issue too badly.
Aren’t those little Bush-Cheney ’04 bumper stickers with 12 stars on them a desecration of the American flag? Surely any replication of the American flag without the full 50 stars is an insult to every state that joined the Union from Rhode Island through Hawaii.
Basket?….don’t look…don’t look….Ugghh…yuk…too late…this was totally unnecessary.
We can just make 49 star flags or 12 stripe flags and burn them anyway. It cannot be stopped.
I liked the Bush bumper sticker proclaiming “Four More Wars!”….we could burn that.
We can burn the prsidential flag. Are there any congressional flags? It just cannot be stopped.
I, along with most other veterans, served our country, and the oath we took was to defend the constitution. We served under the flag, not for the flag.
Let a few cretiens burn the flag, it just shows their IQ, which is very low. The correct way to dispose of a damaged flag is to burn it, so what will happen to that?
Most veterans are against this amendment to protect the flag.
What drives me nuts about the flag burning crud is that at least part of the origin of it as a protest comes from the fact that the Federal Flag Code says “preferably by burning” for disposing of a flag too damaged or soiled to be flown respectfully.
All the shouting has produced a huge number of people who are completely detached from the symbolic origins of the act — a belief that the actions being protested are so grievous that they have, themselves, desecrated the flag, which must be cremated as a result.
People these days just know it’s a good way to get a rise out of certain political groups. This makes me very sad.
Ah! Thank you very much for the explanation of the proper symbolic meaning of flag burning. That clears up a lot of things for me, including, I suspect, my question from last night about how cross burning could possibly make any sense at all. (And if that’s correct, then I feel more than a bit sick.)
I think that this is only the meaning of the burning of the American flag when done by an American citizen. When all those Danish flags (along with a couple of American ones thrown in for good measure) were being burnt recently, I’m pretty sure that all those people were trying to say was that they greatly disrespected the country in question. The other thing they were doing was trampling the flags underfoot, which speaks for itself, whether or not anyone believes that the flag in question is an intrinsically sacred object which can actually be desecrated.
Can any of the non-Americans speak to how their flags are viewed in their own culture. Obviously, any people is going to show great respect to its flag, since it is the symbol of their nation, but it has always seemed to me that Americans carried that a bit farther – a feeling born out by some of the comments above indicating that many Americans tend to conflate the flag and the country. Do other cultures have the idea of their flags being objects able to be desecrated? If they don’t, then Michael’s comment in his earlier post – where he expresses puzzlement as to why a fellow Dutch citizen might feel the urge to burn the flag and why they wouldn’t just leave the country instead – makes perfect sense.
If burning the American flag indeed has the meaning that H.A. Kiya Nikol explains that is does, then it is a much more profound political statement than I ever imagined, and it in no way expresses contempt for America itself – quite the opposite. In fact, I might need to burn one myself on behalf of Messrs. Bush, Cheney, &Ashcroft.
I don’t think that it’s a universal thing anymore, if indeed it ever was, but that was meaning that was imputed to the act by a vague acquaintance who was involved in early flag-burning protests (in the 60s and 70s). I figured she would know what she and whatever protestors she worked with meant by it, at least; she appeared to believe that this was the understood framework of the protest at the time.
Well, it’s interesting. I didn’t think of checking wikipedia until now. This was not given as a rationale for burning a flag, but wikipedia is, of course, incomplete, and this rationale does make sense. Obviously, it was her rationale. I did learn some interesting things from the article, though. One of them was that it is against Danish law to desecrate other national flags, but there is no actual law against desecrating their own flag.
BTW, that last name was supposed to be Mr. Gonzalez. Not that Mr. Ashcroft was any better, but I do know who the current Attorney General is…it’s just that my newborn and I both have a cold, and I am so very far beyond exhausted…oops, sounds like feeding time again.
Look, it’s election year and EVERYONE knows Iraq has turned into the bottomless cesspool so what do the desperate despots propose? That old baloney that “flag desecration is unpatriotic and blah, blah, blah.” It’s “win-win” for those creeps (gotta give Rove and the jack-booted minions credit) – either the proposed amendment fails in the Senate and the “red, white, and bluers” can point their fingers at the “traitors, commies, and bums” who voted against it, or it somehow passes the cojones-challenged Senate and House and we’re all one step closer to a highly controlled, less democratic (did someone whisper ‘police state?’) nation. It’s all about control ladies and gentlemen and somewhere the ghosts of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Peron, Milosovic and every other nasty little dictator are smiling.
H. A. Kiya Nicoll
That’s the whole point of dissent! To get a “rise” out of people in a political context, without having to kill them in a revolution or insurgency.
Normally, people go to war over politics. The vast majority of wars are and have always been Political wars. Its certainly the reason for EVERY coup.
We have chosen to allow peaceful dissent with limited civil disobedience instead of shooting politicians. This is exactly what separates us from a banana republic. And it is also the hardest thing for conservatives to understand. I guess they figure they are bullet proof.
I think that the constitutional inconsistencies of the first amendment and the new flag burning amendment are troubling. There fore i would amenmd the amendment to repeatl the first amendment, also other selected ones if it seems reasonable. This would pave the way for a theocratic state and we could then outlaw atheism as well as other questionable beliefs.
dbro
You must be joking.
PING:
TITLE: There Is No Flag But the U.S. Flag, and the Constitution Is Its Prophet
BLOG NAME: Positive Liberty
“America just needs a vacation,” said a friend of mine. That was three freakin’ years ago. He was right back then, and he’s still right now.
It sure would be nice if we could all just have a vacation — from terrorism…
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TITLE: The temperature at which freedom burns
BLOG NAME: Why We Worry
Of late, there has been increasing support for a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning in the US. Apparently the Senate only needs one more vote to pass the amendment, which would then have to be ratified by 3/4 of the states.
The exact wording …