Flag Walking and Flag Burning
17 April 2008, 6:06 pm by Matt Shafer
FoxNews today had an interesting article about a student research project concerning attitudes towards the flag. Susan Crane put US flags on the ground of her student center at the University of Maine, Farmington, and recorded whether or not people would walk on them. 95% did not.
That’s all well and good. The interesting part of the article was this:
But instead of fostering dialogue, the experiment drew demonstrators, among them Vietnam War veteran Charles Bennett.
“As far as I was concerned, that was desecration of the American flag,” Bennett told FOXNews.com. He went down to the student center to protest the display after a friend told him what was going on, he said.
If one considers Crane’s project to be ‘flag desecration’, then saying it shouldn’t be allowed is much like saying that flag burning shouldn’t be allowed. Of course, flag burning, ever since Texas v. Johnson, is protected speech. This is as it should be.
Richard Savage, as quoted by Barack Obama here, summed it up best:
“Those who would burn the flag destroy the symbol of freedom, but amending the Constitution would destroy part of freedom itself.”
Liberty is what makes America great, and the true test of liberty occurs when its exercise offends the society protecting it.
In Quebec (I know I sound like an immigrant always refering to his country, now I understand Antonio the Mexican student) we used to laugh a lot about how Americans react when someone burns their flag. For us, if someone burns our flag, no one cares (except some sovereignists). We came to the fact that it’s just a stupid flag! As George Carlin said it, “I leave symbols for the symbol-minded”.
Yeah..american nationalism gets kinda extreme at times.
It kind of ticks me off when there is talk of a bill being passed about flag burning when there’s about a million more important things that need to be dealt with in this world and this is how we’re using our time? I think it’s quite simple. It’s our right as citizens of our free nation to express ourselves, if that is the purpose of desecrating the flag. And as Pierre-Luc Marchand noted, it’s just a symbol.