The president-elect said that anyone who burns the flag should be punished with one year in prison and a loss of citizenship. But Trump would apparently wish America to become more like Cuba, China and Iran, brutal dictatorships he has continually villainized, where flag-burning is outlawed. Perhaps then, they would drop the matches.
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Other co-sponsors of the bill were Senator Thomas Carper of DE, former Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Senator Barbara Boxer of California.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that flag-burning is “expressive conduct” protected by the First Amendment.
How the nation does not grind to a halt after our new leader thoughtlessly disregards our most sacred of Constitutional amendments, I will never know.
The following year, in “United states v. Eichman”, the top court again affirmed the right to burn the flag when it ruled 5-4 that the Flag Protection Act of 1989 – passed by Congress in response to the Johnson decision – was unconstitutional.
Radical, safe-space-obsessed students are a minority within a minority, and it’s time for politicians, and the rest of us, to cease writing, or legislating, about what they drink, whom they bed and what they do to their American flags.
But that would run contrary to the principles of the United States. The current spike in anti-Semitism, for example, began about 20 years ago as a left-wing phenomenon on campuses, where sometimes it has been confusingly intertwined with principled anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel.
So, as loathsome as flag-burning might be – and we agree that it is – it is a protected form of speech.
In reality, a citizen could not lose his or her citizenship for flag burning. The court sided with Johnson, calling flag burning symbolic speech.
“There’s no doubt he has every right to do it”, Oliva said.
It’s important to note that I do not condone flag burning. “It has, in fact, no history of being directed against any target but the government”. (“You save $5.00!”) Nothing says America like a USA flag wrapped around a can of Coors. Texas thus did exactly what the president-elect wants concerning flag burning.
How disrespectful to those of us who have defended this country, and especially to those who have made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of a grateful nation.
President-Elect Donald Trump sparked controversy with a tweet about consequences for burning the American flag.
I am even willing to look the other way at some of the extremely questionable cabinet positions that have recently been announced.
But what if we burn a flag “not in protest, but in celebration of the very freedoms that allow us to burn a flag?” “And it’s pretty much a flag of evil”. I also don’t see the charm in American flag harem shorts, American flag leggings or American flag flip-flops. You’d think a president would be familiar enough with his forebears to recognize that Jeffersonian quote, but we certainly live in different times. In analyzing those laws before it declared them to be unconstitutional, the Court looked at the original public understanding of those laws and concluded that they were intended not as fire safety regulations – the same statutes permitted other public fires – but rather as prophylactics meant to coerce reverence for the American flag by criminalizing the burning of privately owned pieces of cloth that were recognizable as American flags.
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At the Cincinnati event, Trump and Pence will talk about what is ahead and the “positive change” Trump will bring to the country, spokesman Miller said. We don’t need it to protect Christmas carols.
