…and the smoke goes up, where it clinches the argument for Liberty. Our soldiers fought and died in war to guarantee the communists and other Anti-Amerikans the liberty to burn the flag as a form of symbolic speech. So it gives up its body to secure its meaning, and for 230 years has roughly succeeded. No other in the world is like it in this way…yea, “Shall not perish from this earth.”
This is obviously a constitutionally protected form of symbolic speech. Where no one else’s rights are being violated and fire safety observed, must be allowed.
There are many interesting turns of this question which make it a good one for understanding the constitution in general. I could not legally bun the flag because I do not intend the symbolic speech intended by those who do so. The laws against flag desecration are constitutional too, so that I could be ticketing for leaving one in the rain or letting it touch the ground. I could bun a Confederate flag, however. This flag can appear as a decoration and even a statement of treason or in a theoretical statement, as in the “Ethno-State” of Mr. America First. The same arguments as those that pertain to the Smith Act apply here. But if it appears as a statement of territory or political sovereignty, like the flag on a bank or school, I believe we can take it down by force, properly applied. I sometimes wonder at the Southerners slow to get the news of the result of the Civil War. Yet I think property rights would prevent one from burning someone else’s flag, unless one were in a state where the property rights of the other do not apply.
The use of flag desecration laws to prohibit the symbolic speech of flag burning is, then, a bit like the use of laws forbidding parading without a permit to arrest Martin Luther King Jr, just before he wrote his classic Letter From A Birmingham Jail. The law is constitutional, but parading is not what is occurring, and everyone knows it. But that is why we have judges, to see and to apply the law and the Constitution.
If Mr. Trumpster had read even the most basic documents and done a poor course of 101 American politics, he would have sense enough not to say such things as that flag burners should be deprived of citizenship. He is a tyrant, and will show worse, because he must act from his gut, since he literally does not know what he is doing, despite having aimed at the presidency for many years. His tyranny began to appear in the choice of Mr. flag anti-Bannon comments Bright Bart, then he became more careful when he saw the reaction and realized the election could be overturned.
The talk of recounts and the electoral college may have already saved lives among the opposition in Syria. If we did one thing there, it might be to get the civilians out, and let the Russians have their civil war between the charmers Assad and ISIS. We seem to have tried to get some people out during the cease fire. But this is a Taoist or Aikido-type tactic, to properly recede.
mmcdonald77 