Hot on the heels of their “defence” of (heterosexual) marriage, our friends in Washington have continued to pander to the worst of their constituencies by dragging out another favorite, election-year boogie man: the flag burning amendment. It failed in a shamefully close vote. The sixty-six who voted for it (including 14 who claim to be Democrats) might want to add the Bill of Rights to their summer reading lists (especially that pesky first amendment).
A friend emailed me recently about this latest round of nonsense. His comments were so well suited that I asked if he wouldn’t mind me repeating them here, to which he consented:
“I don’t think there’s an issue that frustrates me more than the idea of a flag-burning amendment. I can’t understand how anybody misses that this violates the first-amendment. People who get worked up about the flag are very loud about ‘protecting freedom’, but they want this? Can a person’s philosophy be any more inconsistent than that?
The act of someone burning the flag is as much a display of freedom as the flag itself. I don’t know, but I bet you would have fried in Germany had you burned a swastika. Or in Russia, you’d have ended up in a gulag for burning an image of Stalin. ”