Back to the "Flag Amendment"

I'm gonna beat it into the ground ...

I read this cool blog by Georgetown Law professors - and one of the contributors commented on the issue - I found his last words to be worth posting ...

"... The authors of the flag amendment want to preserve the flag as a symbol of national unity. But, in the end, as strongly as people feel about it, the flag is just a symbol, and no single person lighting a match to it can weaken the ties that bind us. Our real unity as a people is reflected not in a piece of cloth, but in a set of ideals. Those ideals, revolutionary at the time they were first articulated but also deeply conservative, boil down to this: we as Americans promise each other that when we are in power, we will not use all of that power against the folks who are not in power. We make this promise in part because some day we will not be in power, but also because using all of our power against our fellow citizens is no way to treat people with whom we share a country, a community and a heritage. We make this promise continually to each other, and it is especially important to renew it when our opponents seem deeply wrong and misguided, because, of course, we may seem that way to them. When you strip everything else away, this is the central vision behind all of the detailed provisions of our Constitution. Viewed in this way, it is the not flag burning that threatens our national unity. It is, instead, the flag burning amendment, because that amendment threatens to trivialize and degrade the Constitution and the basic promise we make to each other that it contains."

AH - I love activist professors!