Let's Ban Desecration of the First Amendment By Richard Craig June 13, 1997

In honor of Flag Day and in the presence of C-SPAN, the House voted Thursday for a proposed constitutional amendment against desecration of the American flag.

Does desecration include wrapping yourself in the flag to get re-elected? If so, a lot of House members did their best to incriminate themselves. Once again, our elected officials have shown us how much they can claim to love a symbol without having the foggiest notion of what it stands for.

The problem here is that it's easy to let one's attachment to the nation (and the flag) cloud clearer judgment. Who wants to watch some uncouth moron burning or defacing the symbol of our country? It seems like an easy call -- why should we allow such an in-your-face attack on a symbol of all we hold near and dear?

Unfortunately, the very freedom of our society -- that value we associate most with the flag -- is what protects the rights of people who decide to do anything from burning the flag to using it as a diaper. Desecrating the flag is a fundamentally peaceful act of protest, and our entire democratic system is based on the freedom to protest. Unless you use a burning flag to create the "clear and present danger" of violence or panic (or to ignite a brush fire), you're not breaking the law.

Desecrating the flag is usually done to protest some particular U.S. government policy, and unless I'm mistaken, we're allowed to do that as Americans. This nation was founded on protest, and many of the laws we now support by consensus were only implemented as the result of citizen protest. Based on this, the Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that the right to burn the flag was protected by the Constitution.

It's ironic that protest is an act of participation in democracy, yet many of the people who feel we should rewrite the Constitution to ban flag burning are the same ones who never get around to voting. A more disturbing twist is that many of the people we've elected to preserve democracy are the same ones who are working to limit it right now.

The reason for this is that the issue sells well on television. For politicians looking toward re-election, supporting this bill is an easy way to look like a defender of freedom. Television's most identifiable political trait is its need to boil complex issues down to sound bites, and it's a lot easier to present this amendment as an act of patriotism than the act of watering down the First Amendment.

The flag will always win popularity contests, and it takes some very skillful explanation to remind people that the Constitution protects the rights of those with unpopular ideas. The right to protest against something popular is constitutionally equivalent to the right to advocate something unpopular. People tend to forget that slavery was popular for a long time, and the notion of nonwhites and women having the right to vote and own property was unpopular. Who knows what the popular issue of 2010 will be?

Unlike many scholars, I don't think the American people are fools. The problem is that they may simply love their country too blindly. People are sometimes too quick to equate simple nationalism with patriotism -- it's easier to put flag stickers on your car than it is to act to preserve the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. True, the flag is a proud, powerful symbol of our nation, but the Constitution is the crown jewel of our system of democracy and the envy of freedom-seeking people worldwide.

I say the following without hesitation: If, for whatever reason, I had to give up either the flag or the Constitution, I'd let 'em have the flag every time. It's a wonderful symbol, but the world is full of flags. The Constitution is one in a million.

©1997 Richard Craig. All rights reserved.

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