Mark Steyn, the witty conservative political commentator, has reprinted a column from June, 2005 on the “Greatest Hits” page of his website that is well worth a look. Steyn makes the excellent point that a constitutional amendment to protect the American flag from desecration would only prevent the America haters who are wont to burn a flag from being exposed for what they are.
Although any further discussion about such an amendment is indefinitely on the shelf, the one good reason to support it would be to restore the proper meaning of the word “speech” to the First Amendment. If burning an object like, say, a flag in public is constitutionally protected as “speech,” where does it end? Unfortunately for the doomed amendment, the members of Congress who supported the bill did so only as just another vehicle for grandstanding – mostly as a fraudulent demonstration of patriotism – which is what killed it. Not one of them got it right.