Cal Thomas: Respecting the flag

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday, August 28th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. The American flag stirs emotions, and President Trump wants to protect it. But Supreme Court rulings don’t support that idea. Here’s WORLD commentator Cal Thomas.

CAL THOMAS: President Trump wants to penalize anyone who burns the American flag. The challenge is the Supreme Court has ruled that flag burning is protected under the free expression clause of the First Amendment.

In a statement released by the White House, the president said: “Notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s rulings on First Amendment protections, the Court has never held that American Flag desecration conducted in a manner that is likely to incite imminent lawless action or that is an action amounting to ‘fighting words’ is constitutionally protected.” President Trump continued: “My Administration will act to restore respect and sanctity to the American Flag and prosecute those who incite violence or otherwise violate our laws while desecrating this symbol of our country, to the fullest extent permissible under any available authority.”

The word “sanctity” has lost some of its original meaning. It is primarily a religious word. It means “the state or quality of being holy, sacred, or saintly.” Imputing holiness to a piece of cloth is a form of idolatry.

Yes, the flag stands for something, but we cannot treat it as sacred in the same way that our faith is sacred. We cannot turn a symbol of patriotism into more than it is. But we can—and should—treat the flag with respect.

Even so, the Supreme Court has ruled that in the interest of protecting free speech, disrespect and even flag burning must be tolerated. In two cases – Texas v. Johnson in 1989 and United States v. Eichman in 1990, the court held that the right to protest the flag outweighed the government’s interest in protecting its symbolic role. Therefore, prior efforts to ban flag burning have been declared unconstitutional.

But the president’s statement isn’t really about free speech. It appears to be a political one, designed to keep his base and cable TV hosts and their guests fired up. There isn’t an epidemic of people burning the American flag…and even those who have done so in recent years represent a tiny minority. Some may not even be Americans.

President Trump’s effort to turn flag burning to political advantage is something like adding “under God” to the pledge, which President Dwight Eisenhower did in 1954. Previously, school children had recited the pledge written in 1892 without any reference to God. The move to add God to the pledge occurred when many American politicians wanted to assert the superiority of American capitalism over Soviet communism…a system—that especially conservatives—regarded as godless.

If the president wants to restore universal respect for the flag, the process should begin in schools, where some have stopped saying the Pledge of Allegiance. We should be pledging allegiance to the country, which the pledge eventually gets to with “and to the Republic for which it stands.” That is the correct verbiage. We citizens are pledging our allegiance to the Republic for which the flag stands, not to the flag, itself. Isn’t that what those taking the oath to become American citizens pledge? There is nothing about the American flag in that oath.

Better to mock and isolate those few dumb enough to burn the flag than to lock them up. Shaming those who would burn the flag is better than turning the fabric into an idol.

I’m Cal Thomas.

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