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They Made Me a Flag-Burner
 Last
year there were 141 incidents of flag-burning
in the United States. A chilling statistic, you say?
But those are just the ones that
were reported! We have no way of knowing how many other
flags people  burned
in their basements. The real number, from
coast to coast, may be twice that high.
While our brave men and women
are defending our freedom overseas, hippies within our own borders are
torching Old Glory and lighting their reefers from it! Right here in River City!
We got trouble! Don’t it just make your blood boil? Well, I should say!
Such behavior sends a message,
loud and clear, to terrorists everywhere: “Come and get us! We
don’t have the guts to fight. All we care about is drugs and sex.
We’re ready to be taken.”
But don’t worry. The U.S.
House of Representatives has just voted to ratify a constitutional
amendment to ban flag-burning. This would repair an inexplicable oversight of
the Constitution’s Framers, who made no provision whatever for
protecting the flag. How could such wise men have left us with such a gaping
vulnerability?
Maybe they didn’t. Maybe
they would say that burning a flag during wartime constitutes treason, giving
aid and comfort to the enemy. And since we are pretty much perpetually at
war, this should take care of the problem. Flag-burners can be tried for
treason and shot.
One congressman said the
proposed amendment would have pleased the people in the World Trade
Center who perished on 9/11. If ever there was a cogent argument for
amending the supreme law of the land, I guess that’s it.
![[Breaker quote for They Made Me a Flag-Burner, which deals with impeaching Supreme Court justices: The real danger we face]](2005breakers/050623.gif) Seriously,
folks, the purpose of this amendment might as well be
to prove to the world that this is still the country that passed Prohibition.
The whole thing started in 1989 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that
flag-burning is part of “the freedom of speech” protected by
the First Amendment.
That was ridiculous, but so is the
fury flag-burning provokes. It’s a bit like the Muslim outrage over
“desecrations” of the Koran; thanks to the printing press,
sacred texts are now mass-produced, hundreds of millions of them exist, and
there is no way to protect them all from abuse.
And a flag, also a mass-produced
object, being in no sense sacred, can’t be “desecrated.”
In England, for example, you can burn the Union Jack with impunity, and
nobody cares.
If every one of your neighbors
burned an American flag in his front yard tomorrow, what harm would it do?
They’d merely be destroying a bit of their own property. You might
deplore their attitude, but that’s a different matter. I was irritated
when an artist insulted a crucifix a few years ago, but I never thought the
law should punish him for that; I just thought the government
shouldn’t be subsidizing him.
As a matter of fact, I myself was
taught to burn the flag. If Congress were to subpoena me, I’d have to
confess under oath that I once belonged to a subversive organization called
the Boy Scouts of America, which instructed its members that if a flag
should be soiled, torn, or even allowed to touch the ground, it must be
burned.
A curious taboo, I thought, but I
wasn’t one to question authority. My scoutmaster thought he was
being patriotic. Today patriotism has come full circle and regards burning a
flag as sacrilege.
It seems a rather tedious effort
to amend the Constitution every time the Supreme Court makes an absurd
ruling, which happens on average every week. Just this week it has more or
less abolished property rights, a decision that may have more far-reaching
effects than its merely silly 1989 decision about burning flags.
If you’ll read the
Constitution in question, you’ll notice that it provides for
impeachment. This was meant to be used — not rarely, but always.
Every government official should be constantly aware that he can lose his job
if he abuses his power, just as most people know they can be fired at any
time for abusing their employers’ trust.
But impeachment has become a
dead letter, like so much of the Constitution, and it happens so seldom that
members of the Federal judiciary feel their jobs are safe, no matter what
they do. Until Americans start insisting that overweening justices be canned
for usurping power, we can expect them to go on treating the Constitution
with contempt. Unlike flag-burners, they are a clear and present danger.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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