Posted on 07/11/2006 10:08:44 AM PDT by Monkey King
WASHINGTON -- I burned an American flag once. I could lie and say I was exercising my First Amendment rights, that I was protesting the first flag-burning statute Congress approved in 1989, but that would attribute more noble motives to my immolation of Old Glory than I actually had. Really, I just wanted to know how it felt to burn it.
It felt really, really weird.
Southerners have a flag fetish. We've been wrapped up in them for some time. Fine motives are generally attributed to the flags in our fights over them. As the Senate debated the flag-burning amendment prior to Independence Day, flag memories kept popping into my head.
The flag-burning debate comes at a time when politicians, pundits and regulators at the FCC are cracking down big time on what seem to many of us to be the highly subjective issue of indecency. Fines for supposedly indecent speech on broadcast TV and radio have reached the usurious rate of $325,000 per incident. At least one lawmaker wants to prosecute the New York Times for treason because the newspaper informed us that the government is not only looking into our phone calls and e-mails but our bank records. Add to that the cliffhanger vote on flag burning and it's not just a chilling effect, it's a blizzard.
When I first started covering politics in Alabama, the controversy over the Confederate battle flag was at its height. The flag had been flying above the state Capitol since 1962. It was supposedly put there in recognition of the Civil War centennial. Proponents of that flag waving said it was a way to honor the chivalrous actions of the Confederate troops. Opponents said it was a racist symbol that should come down. Eventually, it did.
Over my recent "district work period" (that's Congress-speak for vacation), I was helping my mom, Doris, clean out her house in Birmingham, and I came upon a picture of my late Uncle Gene. He was wearing a U.S. Army uniform. It was 1944.
My aunts tell me Francis Eugene Boliek was in the 82nd Airborne. My aunts Johnnie Apple and Carolyn Ledbetter say he got the Purple Heart for shrapnel wounds and because his feet were frozen. Like so many veterans, he didn't talk about the fight when he got back.
His picture was wrapped in a Nazi flag. More precisely, a gudgeon. A black swastika sits in a white circle on a red field. The triangular banner would have flown from a tank's radio antenna.
It's only cloth, but malevolence courses through its fibers. The power of this evil symbol amazes me. I brought the photograph and the flag back home to Maryland. Now I don't know what to do with it. I really don't want a Nazi flag in my house, but I can't bring myself to sell it. I can't burn it either.
I tried to imagine my uncle fighting the 1st SS Panzer Division around Trois Ponts and freezing his feet and other anatomical parts in the Ardennes. I wondered what he would think about the flag-burning amendment.
Was my uncle fighting for a bunch of colorful cloth strips and stars?
No one risks their life for strips of cloth. It's the principles that matter. One of those principles protects our right to voice unpopular thoughts, even if it means burning the flag. I can't ask Uncle Gene about it, but I like to think he'd agree with Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii). In World War II, Inouye won the Medal of Honor and lost his right arm.
"This objectionable expression is obscene, it is painful, it is unpatriotic," Inouye said during the debate over the amendment. "But I believe Americans gave their lives in many wars to make certain all Americans have a right to express themselves, even those who harbor hateful thoughts."
I hope that's what Uncle Gene fought for. The amendment was defeated by one vote. On such slim threads our freedoms rest.
He tries to make a point about the (American) flag as a flag not meaning anything, but characterizes the Swastika flag in which "malevolence courses through its fibers."
Inconsistency, thy name is Liberalism. Or stupidity.
But I repeat myself.
"Southerners have a flag fetish."
Oh, jeez...
Is everything sex with libs?
I wonder, would he defend the right for the Klan to burn crosses using the same logic?
Having myself fought for that flag and what it stands for, and the Constitution which it represents, I have to agree that there should be NO constitutional amendment that keeps it from being legally burned.
But at the same time, don't get in my way when I catch someone in my eyesight trying to desecrate it.
I don't want to see the American flag burned. But I still want my right to burn it.
That pretty much sums it up.
When a flag is so worn it is no longer fit to serve as a symbol of our country, it should be destroyed by burning in a dignified manner.
We did this at a boyscout jamboree once. It was done with great respect.
I'm sorry, but IMHO that is the negation of the notion that burning flags is a natural right.Flag burning is "speech," but what does it say?
Taking your clothes off in public communicates something too - but what does that say?
My position is that taking your clothes off in public says something which the government may legitimately proscribe - and that the same thing is true of flag burning. I think that televising a ritual desecration of the US flag should be understood as a application for the process of selling your citizenship on ebay to someone who offers bona fides of being more loyal than you are.
I think that burning your own American flag on your own property should be fine, if you want.
I also think that if I see someone burning an American flag on someone elses property, it should be legal for me or someone else to open up a can of whoop-ass on them.
Not because it was a good thing to do, or a bad thing (transgressive) - which, while childish, would have been at least an affirmative reason. He "...just wanted to know how it felt to burn it."
I think that's a quintessentially leftist trait. Just doing something because you can. There's no morality and no decision making process - if they think they'll get a kick out of it, they'll do it. The more you try to genuinely understand Liberalism, the more it takes on the characteristics of mass psychopathy.
They use flag-burning as many things - a symbol of hate, or grievance with the current administration, or a big FU to those of us who venerate that for which the flag stands. This last they know, and have used to greater or lesser effect over the past decades, but they pretend otherwise; that their desecration is somehow a brave act of first amendment preservation. There are better and more productive ways to affirm the first amendment than burning flags. That the left doesn't use them speaks volumes about their character and about their true intent.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter what they do to themselves, but when other people are sucked into their idiocy (witnessing a flag-burning on the news or in the public square), then a stand has to be made, to exercise one's own first amendment rights, and call an idiot an idiot.
Another poster said it well, and I will paraphrase and add a codecil - By all means let's have the right to do this, but let's also keep track of those who *do* do this and then weigh their consequence in society accordingly.
It's every bit your right to disagree with me and I respect that and would defend to the death your RIGHT to disagree.
That being said
It's still my right to not agree with a constitutional amendment preventing flag burning.
Wonderful Country we live in isn't it?
It's not hate if you just hate America.
Silly Conservative, Rights are for Liberals!
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