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Rally ’round the flag

The politics of this fall’s midterm election aside, why now? There has been no rash of flag burnings in response to George W. Bush’s criminal Iraq war, like the ones that rent the national psyche during the Vietnam-era protests. By some accounts, it has been more than 30 years since a flag has been burned in a significant act of political defiance. The only rational explanation that comes to mind is that it is a manifestation of a deep sense of collective insecurity about what this nation stands for. It is another battle in the interminable culture wars that plague the nation. America may pay lip service to the concept of freedom, but it seems to yearn for conformity with a fervor that is religious in its intensity. The very idea of desecration is bound up in a sense of the religious. Desecration is visited upon religious shrines, not civic symbols. Our national lack of resolve about how to keep church and state not only separate but also distinct only adds to the confusion.

Clarity on this issue is nevertheless possible. To achieve it one must embrace the idea that the flag we honor — that we salute in schools and ballparks, and that our armed forces fight under — is the symbol of all that we honor in the name of freedom. Freedom is a sophisticated concept, not easily hammered into one-size-fits-all. Freedom’s strength lies in its elasticity, its ability to accommodate ideas that at a glance may appear to be — or in fact are — in conflict with one another other. It is as robust as it is gentle. Freedom is more than the veneer of our democracy; it is our bedrock.

This move by our elected representatives to constitutionally outlaw flag desecration, if successful, would be the first time in our history that the Bill of Rights has been altered to restrict liberty. For that is what this amendment would do: limit free speech by narrowing the parameters of political protest. It is a form of vicious prior restraint. And if the amendment actually passes, and its intent is applied, the debate over what is desecration and what is not would prove to be as distasteful and divisive as the speech it seeks to ban.

Politics is not about taste; it is about legitimacy, about the primacy of ideas — good, bad, and indifferent. There is nothing neutral about the idea embodied in this proposed constitutional amendment. Its life force corrupts our ideals. In religious terms, it corrupts our political soul.

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