Challenging the right: Flag burning under Republican fire
It’s that time again-that special time that only comes about every four years: time for Congress to attempt to eliminate flag desecration as a protected form of free speech. Every four years, just before the presidential election, Republicans in Congress force a vote on a flag-burning ban. Congress last voted on this issue in 2000 and came within four votes of securing its passage. This year, the Washington Post reports that activists on both sides count 64 senators who favor banning flag desecration, three short of the required two-thirds majority. This year’s vote, which is not yet scheduled, but is expected sometime before Oct. 8, smacks more of election year politics than actual patriotic values. In a year when terrorism fears and war-time patriotism are important issues, it seems that the vote is designed to embarrass Democratic senators (who typically oppose such a ban).
Such a ban is wrong on several levels, not the least of which is its shameless manipulation by Republicans for political gain. Focusing national attention on this relatively unimportant issue shows that the Republican-controlled Senate is less interested in the important policy decisions still facing this Congress than it is in embarrassing Democrats in an election year.
More worrisome than the political games overshadowing the Senate’s important business is the subversion of patriotic feeling for political gain. Congress last debated this issue four years ago. If genuine patriotic feeling lies at the heart of this attempt to ‘protect’ the flag, then why has it taken so long for the congressmen who support it to return to it? If congressional Republicans were actually intent on passing this ban, why is it not a perennial topic? Furthermore, Republicans misuse patriotic feeling when they use it to justify a ban on a form of symbolic speech. True patriotism questions the policies and decisions carried out under the flag of the state one is loyal to. Forcing citizens to respect their nation’s flag fosters frustration by repressing dissent and replaces truly patriotic feeling with blind nationalism.
Twenty years after the events that led to Texas v. Johnson (1989), a Supreme Court case that ruled that flag burning is a constitutionally protected form of symbolic speech, this inflammatory protest is still under fire from the right. It was at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas, that a man was arrested after he burned a flag in protest of certain policies of the Reagan administration. Freedom is not real unless one is free to desecrate the symbol of that freedom. Yet it is the Republican Party, the party that speaks of bringing freedom to Iraq, that wants to restrict your right to speak out against the government by burning its flag. Sometimes the enemies of freedom live in Washington D.C., not Baghdad.
Brandon Holcomb
Graduate Assistant
The Colonnade
Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Oct 1 2004. Filed under Opinion.
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