Overkill on Flag Burning

Burning the U.S. flag as an expression of political protest is not exactly an everyday activity in this country, however popular it may be with mobs abroad. By one scholar’s estimate, the United States has averaged only about two political flag burnings a year over the last two centuries.

The rarity of the event does not, of course, lessen the anger most Americans feel when they see the flag desecrated. But it would be a grave mistake to let anger become the promoter of bad law. Patriotic revulsion should not be allowed to dishonor what the flag stands for, including the guarantees in the Bill of Rights.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1989 and 1990 that flag burning is a constitutionally protected form of speech, however repugnant it may be to the majority. Those decisions predictably prompted a move to amend the Constitution to give Congress the power to make flag desecration a crime. Last year the House approved such an amendment, and the Senate is expected to take up the matter soon. A two-thirds vote in the Senate would send the proposed amendment to the states. Ratification by three-fourths of the states would enshrine it in the Constitution.

Americans should resist attempts to erode any of their free-expression protections, whatever the provocation. Offensive and contemptible through flag burning may be, it hardly threatens the security or stability of the nation. “We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration,” Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote for the Supreme Court majority in 1989, “for in so doing we dilute the freedom that this cherished emblem represents.” That is the voice of reason, and it should prevail.