Flag Burning Amendment

Ugly picture to the right! Ain't it?

Speaking personally, I can't imagine having any respect for anybody who, upon seeing this picture, wants to emulate the lunatic with the skeleton body paint. The question at hand is whether his act of burning the American Flag should be criminalized.

Yesterday the US Senate voted 66:34 for an Anti-Flag-Burning Amendment to the US Constitution. This was one vote short of the number required to pass. I haven't read the text of the amendment so have no comments to make on whether it was intended to punish only burning or other forms of physical and symbolic insult to Old Glory. But I do have something to say.

As I wrote in a comment at The Glittering Eye

I’d note that the most prominent belief-system that legislates punishment for damage or insult to a physical symbol is Islam (e.g. the Koran). And we know the kinds of problems that followed the Koran flushing rumors. Do we really want to copy such a barbaric rule for our own country?

After detainees at Guantanamo lied about the Koran being flushed down a toilet the Moslem World rioted, killing a bunch of Moslems. This is what enshrining a symbol with Holiness, and prohibiting any insult to such a symbol, as if the symbolic object were a person to be insulted, leads to.

Before we as a nation decide to set in our Constitution a prohibition against insulting the flag, let us remember that our founding fathers declined to recreate a monarchy in America precisely because of the way that treason was defined in England as any insult to the person of the King or his heir. We avoided one danger in refusing to annoint a Holy King to rule over us. Let us not annoint a Holy Flag to wave over us.

One Nation, Under God

NOT One Nation, Under a Holy Flag

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