Do we really need a Constitutional Amendment banning desecration of the flag, or would a federal law be sufficient?

Is the GOP simply using this issue as another political stunt and creating more partisanship to posture themselves for the next election? Are they still exploiting 9/11?

Flag burning rarely occurs in this country; wouldn't an amendment simply encourage some to burn the flag in protest or to make a statement?

Probably too many questions here, but there's many more to this issue, I think.

No, we don't need such an amendment. It would be anti-thetical to the Bill of Rights. Like it or not, the right of free speech in this country means protecting the speech you hate, not just the speech you like.

No, a federal law wouldn't work. The Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that flag burning is protected free speech, hence the recurring proposals for a Constitutional Amendment.

I was disgusted to learn that Brian Baird has voted 4 times in favor of this amendment, probably pandering to his ignorant hillbilly constituents in SW WA. And Adams voted for it this time because Ft. Lewis and McChord are in his district. Again pandering to ignorance and emotion. I understood Americans fought to preserve freedom, not restrict it.

That hypocritc Republicans support it doesn't surprise me. They've always been 100% behind freedom, as long as it's the freedom they exclusively approve of.

Sincerely,

Salmo g.

Burn the Flag?
Would you burn a Bald Eagle?
It is a symbol. It should be protected. Burn the Flag and die.

NIMBY.

(That and $2.50 will get you a cup of coffee)

It's a pile of horse pucky. Just shows people inability to accept that freedom swings both ways. Kinda like Harley

I am 100% approving of a person's right to burn the flag, as long as they wrap themselves in it first.
The "First Ammendment Free Speech" protesters in this country are only trying to shock and disgust the mainstream with thier antics. Are they willing to die for thier cause? If that were the case we would be seeing self imolations like the Buhdists in Vietnam. Or suicide bombings like in the middle east and New York/Washington/ PA etc...
Thankfully, we live in a country where protestation doesn't have to be taken to those kind of extremes. I wonder if the "freaks" understand just how put off those of us in the mainstream are by thier brand of protest? I would welcome intelligent discourse on any subject. However, the scorched earth tactics employed by both sides I find disgusting!
Still G

Kinda like the Second Amendment crowd, eh?

Amen. I think that's why you don't see flag burning here. It's just not our MO as a culture.

But I do see flag desecration on a daily basis by well-intentioned citizens. The ones that have flags strapped to their cars zipping down the freeway while the flag is being torn to shreds; leaving it attached to the vehicle in the driveway all night unilluminated; the little ones from a local parade discarded on the ground or in the trash; using the ones printed in local newpapers to line their birdcages; etc.

Those kinds of things drive me up a wall.

Nothing like attacking hugely important issues like this one.

Idiots.

It's pretty illuminating on the value system of some of those on the left that have no respect for property rights and would have you put in jail if you cut down a tree or simply developed on your own property--but if you just want to burn the flag on your property (or the publics for that matter) they have no problem with it and want to protect your right to do it.

I guess you have to pick your battles.

Huh?!? and it's about time that the courts step up. The laws are there on the books to send Rapists/Robbers and Murderers away for a very long time. Instead, we are still burdened with the "War on Drugs". Let's either declare victory or call in the Militia on that one. I'll be the first to raise a rabbel and descend onto the Tacoma Hilltop with the mission to clean out the Tweakers/Whores and Freaks!!
Dang it Harley, now see what you done? You went and got me spun up!!!
Deep Breath ...
That's Better..
Still G

Absolutley. I've said that here more than once. My tongue-in-cheek comment about the Second Amendment refered to some here that use scare tactics and over-the-top arguments about Democrats having a hidden agenda to repeal the Second. However, I believe the Second will never go away because of the First, and vice versa.

I agree there are enough gun laws - they just need to be enforced.

But please, leave the whores alone. I can't afford my daughter's tuition.

"It's pretty illuminating on the value system of some of those on the left that have no respect for property rights and would have you put in jail if you cut down a tree or simply developed on your own property--but if you just want to burn the flag on your property (or the publics for that matter) they have no problem with it and want to protect your right to do it."

So flag burning is comparable to private property rights or cutting down trees or development?
The conservative supreme court just dealt property rights a stiff upper cut. Local governments can now take your property for private, non-governmental, enterprise.

The difference still eludes Rory.

Shocking.

Dangit! You mean i wasted that rant! I only have so many of those left at my advanced age and they need to be savored not wasted.
G

It's NOT a conservative Supreme Court~if anything it's recent rulings indicate it leans slightly left.
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Perhaps my analogy missed the mark a bit--it would have been more illuminating on some of the lefts misplaced values to talk about how they're more offended and outraged when a child publically reciting the 'Pledge of Allegence' includes the words, 'One Nation under God' at the end of it than they are when someone burns the American Flag in public.

They (liberals) want to protect the rights of those who would desicrate the symbol of our nation and want to inprison those who want the right to publically acknowledge God while paying homage to that symbol.

Go figure.

At the risk of sounding repetitious, you are an idiot.

How about naming for us just ONE instance where someone was arrested and tried for reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Hell, how about someone actually pressing charges.

Your hyperbole is so comical. I just finished some training and realize that you and bin Laden have much more in common that you'd think.

By the way, "one nation under God" is in the middle of the pledge, not the end. Perhaps you should try reciting it a little more often so you remember these things.

Rory, at the risk of piling on, please allow me to ask you to consider something. Please, please, please, go fishing, make love to your wife, do something with your kids, just go out and commune with nature for a while. Anything to try and get you back to some semblance of reality. Your last post in this thread makes me very concerned over the state of your mental health. If you really believe what you said, you need Professional help. If it is just your idea of fun, please see the suggestions above.

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The A.C.L.U. has brought multiple cases to court in an effort to get 'One Nation Under God' legally removed from the pledge (you can't be arrested for reciting it until it's made illegal)--So if goAMFharley and KK keep making donations to them (the A.C.L.U.) perhaps they'll be succsessful someday--then local chapters of N.A.M.B.L..A. (the North American Man Boy Love Association who the A.C.L.U. also represents) can open up their meetings to discuss the pleasure they (adult men) derive from having sex with small boys without having to foolishly acknowledge God while reciting the Pledge.

What is it about the left and God?

One Nation Under....
By Don Feder
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 30, 2004

What is it about the Left and God? Why do the mildest public expressions of faith drive them nuts? Is there a connection between the treason of liberals and their war on religious expression?

Rep. Jim McDermott, D-WA, went to Iraq in the fall of 2002 and loudly proclaimed that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and Bush would knowingly lie to the American people to foment a war. If there was a Nobel Prize for giving aid and comfort to the enemy, McDermott would be the odds on favorite.

On Tuesday, Mc Dermott struck again. The Washington state Democrat was given the honor of leading the House of Representatives in The Pledge of Allegiance. In discharging that duty, he did a bit of secularist editing, omitted the words "one nation, under God."

When asked to explain the revision, a spokesman for the Congressman replied that McDermott hesitated to recite the Pledge as written, because a 9th Circuit Appeals Court decision (declaring God in the Pledge unconstitutional) is currently under review by the U.S. Supreme Court. According to the psychiatrist-cum-politician, until the Supreme Court grants God a place in the Pledge, He should be left out.

Or, maybe McDermott thinks that invoking the God of Judaism and Christianity will offend Moslem fighters in Fallujah.

Unlike McDermott, Supreme Court justices did not travel to Baghdad to flack for Saddam prior to the war. Still the court is doing its part to give God the old heave-ho, weakening our moral defenses in the process. (Do the justices actually believe young Americans go into battle inspired by the latest judicial reinvention of the Constitution, instead of by the God of the Bible?)

While McTraitor was taking God out of the Pledge, the Supremes declined to hear an appeal from two lower court decisions banning cadets at the Virginia Military Institute from praying before meals.

We’ve all seen pictures of American military in Iraq praying in the field – and over the bodies of their fallen comrades. One can imagine Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg jumping out from behind a sand dune during one of these impromptu services, shouting: "Cease and desist! You’re shredding the Constitution. A state church is imminent!"

When it comes to removing religion from our public life, the Left (commanded by the ACLU, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and People for the American Way) marches triumphantly from victory to victory.

In the past 40 years, its banned school prayer (including silent meditation), eliminated graduation invocations, driven crèches and menorahs from public parks, taken carols out of school assemblies, purged Ten Commandments monuments and now has called into question God in the Pledge of Allegiance.

The atheist dad who initiated the Pledge case says he’ll next challenge House and Senate chaplains and the practice of opening sessions with a prayer. Can "In God We Trust" on our currency be far behind?

The Left claims its defending freedom of conscience. Apparently, for liberals, freedom of conscience begins and ends with those offended by religion.

Christian parents whose kids are given condoms in school or subjected to indoctrination in the guise of sex education, taxpayers compelled to subsidize the latest blasphemy from the National Endowment for the Arts, college students who are forced to listen to tax-paid Marxist propaganda spewed by their professors, traditional Catholics forced to fund population control – no one on the Left cares about their consciences.

God in the Pledge of Allegiance – what’s the big deal? No one is being forced to recite the pledge. It’s no longer mandatory in public schools. If they hear those fateful words, "One nation, under God, indivisible," will leftists faint, suffer emotional trauma requiring years of therapy, melt away like the Wicked Witch of the West?

It’s an excuse – and a weak one at that. I think even the most die-hard ACLU-er understands that the Founding Fathers weren’t Benjamin Spock, Margaret Sanger and George Soros, and that the Declaration of Independence isn’t the 18th century equivalent of the Humanist Manifesto II.

There’s more involved here than a need to maintain the mythical wall of separation. The Left’s antipathy to God and its hostility to America go hand-in-hand. It views both nationalism and traditional religion as outmoded and dangerous.

Marxists (the ideological precursors of modern liberals) expected God and the nation state to fade away together.

As they conceived it, the future would find mankind in a workers’ paradise with no need for flags, crosses and other symbols of a savage past. Marxists themselves were building on the legacy of the Jacobins of Revolutionary France, who closed churches, persecuted clerics and set up statues of a ******* of Reason.

While some ‘60s radicals tried to harness religion to their cause (Fr. Drinan, the Berrigans and the Maryknoll Order come to mind), it was a fad whose fading echoes reverberate in the pronouncements of the National Council of Churches. The antiwar movement found more in common with the God-is-dead movement than with even the trendiest mainline churches.

Like the flag, God commands loyalty. Both the nation and traditional faith call for sacrifice. And while God and country can conflict, in America, religion provided the rationale for nationhood.

From the very beginning, the colonists viewed America as providential – working out God’s purpose in history.

Thus the multiple references to God in the Declaration of Independence. Thus the allusions to the Deity in the words of our greatest presidents ("That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom" – Abraham Lincoln.) Thus the appeals to God in times of trouble – "And this be our motto, in God is our trust." (The Star-Spangled Banner) "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" (World War II) and "God Bless America" on bumper-stickers that adorned a million cars after 9/11.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed: "Religion in America…must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it."

Confirmation of this observation may be found in the colonial churches that preached independence, and in the northern churches that preached abolition.

Perhaps the Left believes that spiritual sanitation will weaken America, thus facilitating the downfall of what it sees as the principal impediment to peace and justice in the world.

In his oft-quoted farewell address, George Washington (no secular humanist, he) advised his countrymen: "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens."

For the Left, patriotism isn’t a tribute but a reproach. What Washington called supports and pillars, leftists view as obstacles to their deconstruction of America.

For the Left, it’s one nation under Gore, with income equality and racial justice for all.

Seems to me they accept God and live peacefully within His grace. So why is the right so afraid of the left? The same reason bin Laden fears the West? Is there a correlation?

So no one's been arrested for citing the pledge or even praying, for that matter. Yet you feel the need to cut-n-paste some diatribe from a radical fundamentalist, and continue your campaign to promote an organization that tries to legitimize illicit relationships between men and boys. Take Eddie's advice: get some counseling. You seem awfully angry and have all the ear-markings of someone walking into King County courthouse with an inert grenade.


Nice to see you changed intelligence to its correct spelling, however. :rolleyes:

Sincerely,

The Downing Street Memo

So let me get this straight--you guys are claiming that the A.C.L.U. with the financial backing (and blessing) of it's liberal minded (left of center) supporters are not actively campaigning through the courts to have the words 'One Nation Under God' officially removed from publically recited versions of the Pledge of Allegiance?

Do you agree with the A.C.L.U.'s efforts to do so?

If you don't then the original analogy wasn't direct towards you so don't get your waders in a bunch.

I do really appreciate all of the heart felt concerns expressed for my welfare though.