This is one issue (perhaps the only one) on which Rep. King and I disagree.
“Our Founding Fathers would have never imagined the need for an amendment to the Constitution like this,” said King.
They didn't want it. All they cared to say about it is already covered in Amendment I. Flag-burning is political speech. They probably never dreamed the people would turn into such overt nationalists as to want such a ban.
Lesser nations founded on bad principles need to protect their symbols, lest they be desecrated every hour of every day by the lowly serfs they call citizens. Our nation needs no such ban. Our nation is strong enough and good enough to weather any assault on its symbols. Throughout our history and into the foreseeable future, those who desecrate our flag only reveal themselves for what they are. They're ignorant. They are worthy of our ridicule as much as they are worthy of our scorn. But, if the time should ever come when our nation is sufficiently mired in tyranny, I reserve the right to burn my flag as a symbol of my hatred of tyrannical nations. I'll likely have to wait for the tears to dry, first.
As for his point that "almost eighty percent of Americans support a Constitutional amendment banning desecration of the American flag," I'd guess the Nazi party and everything it stood for was wildly popular in 1930s Germany, too. That didn't make it right.
I agree with you 100%.
Actually you just have to look at it from a practicality issue;
Any ban on flag burning will INCREASE the number burned.
Everyone that has seen an American flag burned in person in this country, raise your hand....
I'm guessing it's nobody. It's a solution in search of a problem. And the publicity of being among the first arrested for doing this under a constitutional amendment will be so tempting you'll see a massive explosion of people doing it.
And don't kid yourself there will be severe penalties; if a penalty is imposed that makes it worse to do this than beat your wife or drive drunk, etc., the negative publicity would be too great.
A flag-burning ban would be wrong. Free speech does and should allow for it. To ban flag-burning is to slap the faces of all those who fought for our great nation and our flag.
What saddens me is that even when I point out the free speach implications to people they support this just like they supported Campaign Finance Reform.
IF they ban flag burning, I will personally burn a flag on television news.
Excellent analysis.
This is a bad idea which hopefully, will never be enacted.
More circuses for the serfs.
How about something useful like a constitutional amendment that demands that judges follow the constitution when issuing decrees, not international law, nor penumbras, nor flying cow farts.
Another argument against a constitutional flag burning ban is enforcement. Wouldn't you agree that it's kind of a waste of money and time for the legal system to be occupied with countless acts of what is essentially petty vandalism (when I say petty i'm only referring to the basic material of the flag, and not of course the symbolism and history it represents).
I'm sure he's right. They never imagined that anyone would think that people shouldn't have the right to do what they wanted to with their property.
Enforced reverence for national symbols is the mark of a tolitarian government, not a democratic republic.
This amendment would put us on a par with Muslims and their precious koran. We don't quash dissent in America because it keeps dissent from building to explosive proportion.
I second your opinion. Allow the fools that hold this nation in low regard to light a beacon to themselves (as long as it's their flag) so that we may know them. Old Glory is the symbol of an idea. An idea that cannot be burned.
I can't express how pleased I am that the vast majority of posters on this thread stand on the side of freedom.
I'm all for an Amendment prohibiting desecrating the flag. However, the attempts congress made in the past to ban the practice, truly were constitutionally obscene.
And if someone was to vandalize the Lincoln Memorial in the name of free speech?
Geez, let's desecrate what the flag symbolized, to protect the symbol...
Hey Rep King, howzabout you work on fixing some of the real ills in this country, then you can waste time on this stuff when the job we're paying you to do is finished.
U.S. Muslims desecrate American flag
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1419017/posts
So, are these folks simply 'exercising free speech', or would you consider them a threat to the realities behind the symbol?
Personally, I'd trust a Leftist flag-burner just about exactly as far as I'd trust these jihadis...
To suggest that a man is not truly free unless he can, with impunity, publicly urinate on, soil, and burn the symbol of American freedom is patent nonsense. It might just as well be argued that an employee is not truly free to pursue happiness unless he can, with impunity, insult, dishonor, and rail at his employer at work; or that an apostate parishioner is not fully free to practice religion unless can, with impunity, enter the sanctuary and shout the malediction of black mass as the priest is administering the host to the faithful.
Of course a man can do these things. What he cannot do, is do them with impunity, without consequence.
But with the flag, by SCOTUS fiat it is different. The "progressive" elites who have been busy dismantling the strong points of this nation for six decades have decreed that the flag cannot be truly honored unless it may be grossly dishonored. Employing that same illogic a militant feminist might say widespread genocide by abortion is holy and good because without it live childbirth has no value.
Far from making our flag a more robust and enduring symbol of freedom, the progressives' desecration-by-decree has devalued and marginalized it. Almost 60 years ago the Supreme Court knocked the first brick from the foundation when it decreed the commercial exploitation of the flag was constitutionally permissible. By 1989, its devaluation was almost complete and needed only one quick coup de grace, which was administered by a 5-4 decision striking down a Texas law banning the burning of the flag.
Justice Stevens, usually the most faithful supporter of the ACLU, wrote the stirring dissent in that case. This would not seem to make sense until one remembers that Justice Stevens was reared in an era when the flag was widely and deeply honored as a unifying symbol for all Americans, and that he fought for and under that flag in the Second World War alongside men who did not return, many of whom still sleep in foreign countries, but in cemeteries under US control, where the Stars and Stripes still waves majestically and pure in highest honor of their last full sacrifice.
If you want to experience the grave great value and power of the flag as earlier generations of Americans experienced it, go abroad, visit the American military cemeteries in Normandy, in Libya, in the Netherlands, and in the Philippines. It is far more difficult to sense the power on our own shores. Due to the influence and demands of ignoble and rude men, that spirit has fled its birthplace.
Nothing is made more pure or sacred by allowing rude men to destroy or stain it, and pronouncing that permisiveness "good."