OTHER COMMENTARY / EXCERPTS : Individualism Regnant

One of the transforming events in our early history involved symbolic speech. Would we remember the colonists who protested the tax on tea if they had simply given speeches condemning the tax? They made their point by dumping tea into Boston Harbor. I can imagine King George ordering the arrest of the tea dumpers and arguing, in the words of dissenting Chief Justice Rehnquist, that the protesters still had “a full panoply of other symbols and every conceivable form of verbal expression to express deep disapproval of national policy.” But in a free society, a government should not dictate the form or content of communications critical of its policies.

If the flag is to be exempted from symbolic derision, where would symbolic censorship stop? Would it become a crime to burn our President in effigy, to treat a Bible with disrespect, to fly a flag upside-down? If we begin to amend the First Amendment, every special pleader will present his or her pet candidate for exclusion.

The First Amendment has served this country well for nearly 200 years. It “ain’t broke” and we shouldn’t try to fix it.