Flag protection

Congress is after the Constitution again. The Senate recently revived its attempt to diminish the First Amendment by introducing legislation to bar flag desecration. It is a bill meant more to cause discomfort in its opponents than to accomplish anything productive. Regrettably, both Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins are original cosponsors to this piece of mischief.

Remember all the flag-burnings over the last year? The last 10 years? No? No one else does either. This is not an amendment that has any practical value; it’s an opportunity to pander to the public. The amendment has been raised repeatedly since the Supreme Court in 1990 ruled that flag burning is protected by the First Amendment. Members of Congress reintroduce the legislation because they know it has popular support and because it forces opponents to spend a lot of time explaining how they are just as patriotic as the next member of Congress but that they don’t support the amendment because it is silly.

It is silly because it depends heavily on intent — it would allow anyone to torch the flag as long as they didn’t mean any disrespect by it. Such false protection is inevitable, given that the flag is desecrated regularly on T-shirts, soda cans, truck mud flaps, Fourth of July paper plates and lots of other products. To avoid arresting someone for putting potato salad on a flag plate, the proposed amendment tries to apply it only to the willfully destructive. Whose job will it be to act as Flag Police, sorting out who harmed the flag incidentally and who did it on purpose?

The U.S. flag has been through a dozen wars, countless peace-keeping actions abroad and plenty of protests at home and it has never looked better. Genuine supporters of this amendment fail to understand that the Stars and Stripes is not diminished by bullets or fire, that it withstands all attacks.

The flag is indestructible so long as the ideas behind it are defended. Congress imperils those ideas when it goes after the Constitution and invites further erosion of its guaranteed rights. The country then will have lost something far more important than an individual flag.