Let the Flag Burning Begin

Congressional jellyfish almost set fire to the Constitution recently when 66 Senators voted for a constitutional amendment that would ban desecration of the American flag.

The Senate needed 67 votes to pass the amendment and they missed it by one. Thank the Lord 34 Senators still have a vestigial backbone.

Pee-brained right-wing pundits have been showering us with the urine of their faith, trying to convince us that if we don’t use the power of the strongest government on earth to subdue the half-dozen or so annual flag burners in this nation, we’ll all be doomed to eternity in Hell while civilization slides into a cesspool of anarchy.

Those few, mostly on the left, who are unafraid to take an unpopular stand based on principle, have cited compelling arguments against the ridiculous amendment, including the obvious fact that it’s the metaphorical equivalent of killing a house fly with a tactical nuke.

But a lot of Americas (a majority by some estimates) don’t like the idea of some hippie burning Old Glory on the steps of city hall. So they whip out their emotional six-shooters and commence to shootin’-up everyone’s liberty in the name of patriotism. “String ‘em up. It’ll teach ‘em a lesson.”

Pissy pundits flood the airwaves with silly sophistry, picking apart the boundaries of free speech and patriotism like blind surgeons performing lobotomies.

But the whole flag desecration argument can be reduced to one element that is essential to American liberty: Property rights. Without property rights, we are not free.

If I buy a piece of cloth decorated to resemble an American flag, and the government can put me in jail for not treating this cloth in a manner pleasing to the government’s controlling faction, then I have no property “rights,” only privileges granted to me by the state.

And that, comrades, is about as un-American as it gets.

I don’t like hippies, I think flag-burners are idiots and I wouldn’t waste spit on a Dixie Chick. But nobody has a right to tell me how to treat something I own that looks like an American flag.

Rights don’t come from the Constitution; they are simply protected by it. If Congress and a majority of Americans don’t get that, then they’ve missed the whole point of that great document and the thousands who’ve died to defend it.

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