The World and Everything in It: August 28, 2025

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning.

Parents in Minneapolis are on high alert after a fatal mass shooting at a Catholic school.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: We’ll also revisit the 2023 Christian school shooting in Nashville and hear how it changed that church family.

Also today, practical steps for better heart health.

And later, a former inmate now leading the prison system. He says it’s time to re-think corrections.

SMITH: It’s not enough to just say, ‘Hey, we’re locking them up.’

And WORLD commentator Cal Thomas on President Trump’s executive order on flag burning.

BROWN: It’s Thursday, August 28th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

REICHARD: And I’m Mary Reichard. Good morning!

BROWN: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Catholic school shooting » Families are mourning today after a mass shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis.

Police say a 23-year-old gunman armed with several guns opened fire as students were observing mass Wednesday morning.

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara:

O'HARA: At this point, we know we have a total of 19 victims from this tragedy. Two were young children, ages eight and 10, that were sitting in the pews at mass when they were shot and killed.

Fourteen other children, between the ages of 6 and 15, and three adults … were wounded.

O'Hara said they are all expected to survive. As for the gunman…

O'HARA: The coward that shot these victims took his own life in the rear of the church. That coward has been identified as 23-year-old Robin Westman, no prior criminal history.

No word yet on a motive, but FBI Director Kash Patel says the bureau is investigating the attack as domestic terrorism … and a hate crime against Catholics.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz yesterday called the situation unthinkable.

WALZ: And there's no words that are going to ease the pain of the families today. On behalf of all the people of Minnesota, our deepest sympathies. A wish that any of these words would make what you're feeling now better, but it won't.

President Trump ordered flags at federal buildings to be flown at half-staff until the end of the month … in order to honor the victims of the shooting.

Israel latest » As war rages on in the Gaza Strip … President Trump gathered with top advisors on Wednesday to discuss what a post-war Gaza will look like.

Trump has expressed optimism about ending the war soon. And U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff remarked …

WIKOFF: We think that we are going to settle this one way or another, certainly before the end of this year. Hamas is now signaling that they're open to a settlement.

Witkoff is leading U.S. negotiations between Israel and Hamas.

Separately, Israeli leaders met with U.S. officials in Washington yesterday to discuss the war and post-war Gaza.

And Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon told reporters:

DANON:  In order for the war to end, we need to see the hostages back home, first of all, and Hamas out of the equation.

That comes as Israel ramps up its military operation in Gaza City aimed at fully unseating Hamas as a political and military power in Gaza.

CDC director out » The director of the CDC is out after just weeks on the job. WORLD’s Benjamin Eicher has more.

BENJAMIN EICHER: Health and Human Services announced the departure of Susan Monarez but did not explain it. The Senate just confirmed her on July 29th.

And Reuters is now reporting that several others at the CDC have issued their resignation letters.

The reason was not immediately clear. But The New York Times is reporting that it’s over differences with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr on vaccine policies.

Monarez and others reportedly resisted Kennedy’s dismissal of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel as well as a series of rollbacks of COVID-19 recommendations.

Under new changes, COVID vaccines are only automatically authorized for adults 65 and older and those with high-risk conditions. All others have to get authorization from a doctor.

For WORLD, I’m Benjamin Eicher.

Texas MAHA » Meantime, Sec. Kennedy traveled to the Lone Star State on Wednesday to join Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for a signing ceremony.

The Republican governor signed multiple bills aligned with Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement. Abbott says those bills include one …

ABBOTT: …  That prohibits schools that participate in the national school lunch and breakfast programs from serving foods with additives that are linked to disease, diabetes, and obesity.

Kennedy praised the new laws, including another that prohibits taxpayer-funded food stamps from being used to buy sugary drinks and snacks.

KENNEDY:  We are poisoning 60% of our kids who are getting food stamps. We're giving them diabetes, and then we're paying for it upfront with food stamps. We're paying for it again with Medicaid.

The new measures will also require warning labels on packaged foods containing certain additives and dyes.

Food companies have through the end of next year to begin adding those warnings.

Wildfires » Firefighters on the West Coast are battling several wildfires … including in Central Oregon.  The so-called Flat Fire there is threatening homes. Captain Steve Chapman:

CHAPMAN:  We've got nine task forces, uh, during the day and four at night. So we're spread pretty thin for the amount of structures that we have, so we're really concentrating on the structures that have the most heat around it.

Meanwhile, California's Picket Fire has scorched roughly 7,000 acres near Napa Valley Wine Country.

Public Information Officer Charles Kuniyoshi.

KUNIYOSHI: All efforts are being put in to, um, contain this fire as quickly as possible. Um, we've increased containment.

Firefighters say the weather there has been somewhat agreeable for setting up containment lines.

Improved weather is also helping in Fresno County … where the Garnet Fire has burned some 9,000 acres in the Sierra National Forest.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: more on yesterday’s school shooting in Minneapolis.

Plus, a conversation with a new director at the Bureau of Prisons.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Thursday the 28th of August.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Today, a community grieves after gunfire interrupts Mass at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. Dozens of students from the church’s school joined worshipers at the regular Wednesday Mass on the first day of school.

WORLD’s Christina Grube has more.

CHRISTINA GRUBE: Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said the shooter launched the attack outside Annunciation Catholic Church just before 8:30 a.m…. shooting through the church’s windows.

O’HARA: Two young children, ages eight and 10, were killed where they sat in the pews. Their parents have been notified. 17 other people were injured, 14 of them being children.

O’Hara said dozens of preschool, elementary, and middle school-aged students were attending the mass…marking the first week of class. Students like fifth grader Clarissa Garcia.

GARCIA: So I was at church, and I heard something really loud. I thought it was fireworks in the church, and then I saw the shooting, and I was like 'Oh my gosh, I'm so scared.' And so a teacher led me downstairs to the preschool classroom, and so I went there. And me and my friend were just praying and praying.

Police chief O’Hara said the shooter barricaded one of the exits…and fired dozens of rounds into the building with a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol.

O’HARA: The coward who fired these shots ultimately took his own life in the rear of the church…Our hearts are broken for the families who have lost their children, for these young lives that are now fighting to recover, and for our entire community that has been so deeply traumatized by this senseless attack.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey underscored the sorrow and gut-wrenching loss for the community:

FREY: There are no words that can capture the horror and the evil of this unspeakable act. Children are dead…You cannot put into words the gravity, the tragedy, or the absolute pain of this situation….Do not think of these as just somebody else's kids…Think of this as if it were your own…

Emily Feste lives near the school, where her niece and nephew are students.

FESTE: My husband's a firefighter and he got a phone call this morning that there was an incident at Annuciation…So he, we live nearby so he just took off on foot. Thankfully, we heard about 15 minutes ago that they're safe, but it's so awful and it's so scary…I just pray for the community.

Bill Bienemann also lives about two blocks from the school…and described hearing the shots.

BEINENMANN: I know what gunfire sounds like and I could tell, I was shocked. I said 'There's no way that that could be gunfire,' there was so much of it. So it was sporadic, so it was a semi-automatic; it seemed like a rifle. It certainly didn't sound like a handgun and so he must have reloaded several times for sure.

Chief O’Hara described the shooter as a male in his early 20s. Officials are still investigating the shooter's motive and any ties he had to the church or school.

FBI Director Kash Patel said the shooting is being investigated as a domestic terror attack, and a hate crime against Catholics…adding that the shooter has been identified as a male that identified as a woman.

President Donald Trump ordered all American flags to fly at half-staff through the end of the month out of respect for the tragedy.

For WORLD, I’m Christina Grube.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Up next, with the news of yesterday’s Catholic school shooting many of us may think back to another shooting that happened at a religious school.

On March 27th, 2023, a former student broke through the locked glass doors of The Covenant School in Nashville. The shooter killed three staff members and three students before being shot by police.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: WORLD’s Kim Henderson travelled to Nashville after the shooting to cover the story for us and she’s with us now to reflect on her experiences…Good morning Kim.

KIM HENDERSON: Good morning.

BROWN: Well shortly after the 2023 shooting in Nashville you visited the site…what was that like?

HENDERSON: I remember being struck by the huge media presence outside the school, all the TV trucks and the satellites and, you know, personalities presenting live from that site. And in contrast to that, you had a local element too. You had streams of people from the community coming through and laying down objects at the entrance, you know, stuffed animals, notes, photos. I remember a pizza box with a note written on it. A lot of things that showed, just were evidence of a great loss for that community. And then the next day, I visited a florist that was located near the school. I learned from that business owner that the volume of orders they had had on the Tuesday, the day after the shooting, had actually shut down that store's website. It showed how people all over the country were saddened by this tragedy that had happened in Nashville.

BROWN: Just looking at photographs of the scene and seeing the footage. I’m sure the events in Minnesota yesterday have brought up a lot of painful memories for the families and staff at The Covenant School. We reached out to them for comment and understandably they declined to speak with us…but that’s pretty much been their position since the tragedy unfolded two years ago isn’t it…

HENDERSON: That's right, they've been very closed off and some would say wisely closed off. Covenant had a public relations firm in place by the time I landed in Nashville the day after the shooting and Covenant parents since then have been totally committed to not giving the shooter any notoriety. That's been very important to them.

BROWN: Even though you weren’t able to talk with any or many families after the shooting, you read through the many declaration statements. Talk to us a little bit about what you learned from the court documents, specifically how the shooting affected the children of the school.

HENDERSON: Yeah, those were really hard to get through some of those declarations by the parents. Those were for Chancery Court hearings and they mentioned that their children could no longer sleep well or sleep alone. They had seen some of their kids start to plan ways of escape whenever they entered buildings. And one father noted that his son froze up during a baseball game when he was batting because he heard a car backfire and he thought that was gun shots. And another parent mentioned when it was time for them to go back to school that her children had to be pried out of their van and that sounded really terrible.

BROWN: So sad. You spoke with a counselor a couple of days after the shooting. What did she say about how adults can help kids after surviving such a devastating attack?

HENDERSON: Yes, that was Sissy Goff with Daystar Counseling and she was actually on site during the hours after the shooting, handling some of the responsibilities as parents were reunited with their children. And one of the things she told them then was to let the children take the lead in asking questions and giving and be sure to give them space to feel their feelings. And her group continued to meet with children. In the weeks after that, and I was there later that week at her counseling site, and saw children from covenant with their families coming in to talk with counselors there at Daystar.

BROWN: A number of neighboring churches hosted prayer vigils last night near the Annunciation Catholic School site in Minneapolis. You attended a prayer vigil after the Nashville shooting…tell us about that service and perhaps reflect on why these sorts of gatherings are good for a community?

HENDERSON: Well, the week following the covenant shooting, there were several well-publicized prayer meetings, and Jill Biden even came to town for one of those prayer vigils. And I was in a Christian bookstore and happened to learn that there was going to be a Wednesday night prayer service at the Village Church. And that was where the shooters' parents actually were members. And I decided to go to that gathering and it was a very somber time for that congregation. But the message there was grounded in truth, it was grounded in the gospel, and really that's the only hope that anyone has to cling to during a tragedy like this.

BROWN: The way that you recall all of those details with such clarity, this is just not something that you ever forget, is it?

HENDERSON: It's not, it was just such a sad time and you know, you go there to report a story and it's just hard to know what is proper to report and something like that.

BROWN: Kim Henderson is senior writer with WORLD. We’ll include a link to her 2023 story from Nashville in today’s transcript.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Up next, a bit of a turn here… to heart health.

It’s hard to believe it, Mary, but it’s been a year now since you were hospitalized with heart problems.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Yeah, that’s right.

BROWN: So we thought on this one year anniversary would be a good time for an update, and what you’ve learned.

REICHARD: Learned a lot! A crash course in cardiology 101 really. First thing I learned is that heart disease is the number one killer in this country.

I started listening to Dr. Joel Kahn, recommended to me by a listener, in fact. Dr. Kahn’s a preventive cardiologist, also a clinical professor and an author.

JOEL KAHN: Every 34 seconds in America, somebody dies of heart disease. That’s number one by far. Every year for over 100 years number one. Equally shared between men and women.

Those numbers land personally, because I’m one of those statistics. I had a heart attack last spring.

KAHN: The body has an amazing ability to hide disease and that’s not just heart disease. Why do people get diagnosed with stage four cancer? 

I think you just shared with me that there was a period of time before you had your cardiac history that, in retrospect, you think you had symptoms. And many people think it's heartburn. Think it's, they've strained the muscle and all that, but a lot of people literally have no symptoms til the day they have a heart attack, or occasionally the day they drop dead, which is obviously so tragic.

Truth is, I had symptoms for years. And I have a terrible family history of heart disease. But my then-cardiologist said all was well.

He asked if I was having chest pain. I said no. What I didn’t mention was the neck and jaw pain I would get just sitting at my desk. And he didn’t ask me that.

Then one night, I woke up around 3 a.m. with excruciating jaw pain—I mean, I thought my teeth would explode out of my head. First, I remembered that doctor telling me I was Type-A personality and probably just needed to calm down.

But… I’d been asleep. So how uptight could I have been?

Then came the second thought: maybe I’m dying. I braced for that and imagined heaven. Instead, I fell back asleep. And the next morning, I got up, went to work, told not a soul. Queen of denial!

Months later, I switched to a functional medicine practice. My nurse practitioner ordered a heart calcium CT scan. You want a zero score on that. Mine was in the high 400s.

Dr. Kahn says my story is all too familiar.

KAHN: There is a test that’s the equivalent of a mammogram for breast cancer and the colonoscopy or ColoGuard for colon cancer.

So don’t wait for symptoms. Everybody—I use hashtag, ‘test, not guess.’

It turns out, I had an 90% block. One thing led to another and I received two stents last August. I’ve been in exercise therapy, taking medications, and eating better ever since.

The test Dr. Kahn wants everyone to know about is that heart calcium CT scan. Randomized studies show better outcomes with that known score.

Now, some people with high scores may not have significant disease and in the wrong hands, it could be used to promote further unnecessary testing. But it’s noninvasive and relatively cheap—especially considering the risk.

KAHN: There’s no needle, there’s no injection, there’s no allergy, there’s no kidney damage. You are exposed to radiation, typically less than a mammogram. And you do it maybe once, or maybe once every five to 10 years based on the outcome.

That test has been widely available for 30 years, 10,000 research studies. And I don’t think 5% of primary care docs order it. I don’t think 5% of cardiologists order it. Almost every hospital in America offers it.

His point is clear: ask about the test.

Back in the 1960s and 70s, researchers identified the “Big Five” heart risks: smoking, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and family history.

But Dr. Kahn says the list is a lot longer than that.

KAHN: Most of them are testable. Some are hugely important, and one is actually—we now recognize—that air quality and air pollution triggers heart attacks.

I hadn’t known that, either. I’d been shoveling mulch around and breathing in dust all day around the time I had my heart attack. Live and learn.

He also wants people to know about a cholesterol particle that is rarely checked:

KAHN: The one that I want everybody to know the name of: It’s a long name: lipoprotein, little a. And if you notice that’s not a capital A, it has to be a lowercase a. It’s a terrible name for a cholesterol particle that 25% of people inherit from mom or dad… Primary care doctors  don’t check that darn box.

While genetics matter, lifestyle matters more.

KAHN: Well yeah, we always say the genes load the gun, the lifestyle pulls the trigger. There's no doubt if you got a bad family history of cardiovascular disease and you love your coke and cheeseburgers and french fries and your recliner watching TV all night, you're in trouble, particularly if you smoke.

Dr. Kahn’s top five prevention steps are straightforward, almost like mother always told you:

KAHN: Quit smoking. You know, there’s still about 10 to 15% of Americans, way down from 50%, but 10 to 15 is still too much.

Get enough sleep:

KAHN: Seven to eight hours quality sleep. If you’re snoring, get tested. There’s things called home sleep studies.

Yea, I also had sleep apnea. Some people need a C-pap machine, but a mouth device worked for me.

And the third prevention step:

KAHN: Nutrition, nutrition, nutrition. Again, I'm not here just to promote, but read my book, The Plant Based Solution. It's a couple years old, with beautiful blueberries, beautiful recipes. The science, you know, yeah, carnivore and keto and paleo and Mediterranean. Of those, the Mediterranean is clearly the best choice.

Fourth step: move.

KAHN: Walk, get your 7000 steps a day. That’s the new number. Do some strength training. Do some balance training. You don’t have to do a marathon or triathlon, in fact, some data, those create as much harm as good.

And fifth step: manage your stress. He strongly recommends things like meditation and controlled breathing as tools to help patients relax…also going to church or synagogue ...

Dr. Kahn is a proponent as well of ECP therapy (extra corporeal pulsation). I’ve been doing that myself. You lie on a table, there’s a Velcro cuff around your pelvis, thighs and calves….

KAHN: …calves, connected to a computer console… and it goes boom, ba-boom, externally. And it really helps circulate blood. Some people call it exercise lying down…

A doctor named Peter Cohn studied it:

KAHN: He saw people that were having chest pain, shortness of breath, had a bypass or had a stent, but they didn’t.

The therapy, which takes 35 sessions one hour each, was FDA approved in the 1990s. Insurance sometimes covers it, and it can help some patients avoid bypass.

Dr. Kahn leaves patients with two reminders:

KAHN: Test, not guess. And number two, I say all the time, ‘A person with good health has 1000 dreams. A person with poor health has only one dream—of course, getting their health back. You don’t want to wait. You want to get checked.

Heart health isn’t something people think about very much, until they have to, like I did. I’d also convinced myself I didn’t have the time to deal with it.

Trust me, that’s a mindset each of us should change. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: The power of a voice…never underestimate that! A mom in England has given her children an unexpected gift…her real voice!

Sarah Ezekiel contracted a motor neuron disease more than 25 years ago. She lost mobility and speech. Ever since, she’s relied on a robotic-sounding computer to communicate.

SARAH EZEKIEL: I felt very isolated and was struggling to communicate… It was a very difficult time….

Well, all that changed when an old VHS tape surfaced that had a few seconds of her original cockney accent. Technicians rebuilt her voice using AI!

EZEKIEL: Hello, this is my voice! It’s a kind of miracle, really.

This gets even better. For the first time, her children could hear their mom as she once sounded. Here’s daughter Aviva:

AVIVA: It’s made me really happy and quite emotional. And I didn’t know she’s Cockney. It’ll take me awhile to process it.

Sarah is an artist and advocate, and calls this breakthrough a milestone:

EZEKIEL: My greatest gift is to have been able to let my children hear my voice again.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday, August 28th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: From prison inmate to second-in-command at the federal Bureau of Prisons.

Deputy Director Josh Smith has made history as the first former inmate hired by the agency that oversees 122 federal prisons nationwide. Before taking on that role, he led a reentry nonprofit for inmates and built a multimillion-dollar construction company that hired ex-convicts.

BROWN: WORLD’s Addie Offereins interviewed Smith last month to hear how his years in prison ministry and his own time behind bars are shaping his vision for reform.

Smith says his early life experiences shaped his calling. By the time he was 16, he’d racked up 10 felony convictions.

JOSH SMITH: My father left my mother early on, and so my mother was that single mother working to survive. I was in trouble as a young kid, very early, without that fatherhood example. Then fast forward. I was a young man on the street, 16 years old, getting out, doing all kinds of things.

That lifestyle led to charges of cocaine and marijuana trafficking. And that landed Smith behind bars for five years in federal prison. He had just turned 21.

In prison, Smith met some highly educated older prisoners who mentored him. He started to read and challenged himself to become an avid learner.

SMITH: When I went into prison, I wasn't that way. I didn't read many books. I didn't try to study anything. I began to read books on real estate. I began to read books on the stock market and other things, including flying an airplane.

REICHARD: But even more importantly, Smith says he read God’s Word and found redemption in Christ.

SMITH: My conversion experience happened while I was in prison when I surrendered my life to the Lord. It was those lessons and those principles that I've learned throughout Scripture, through my relationship with God, and frankly, through the many volunteers coming in to help support and teach that is what helped me transition through prison a better person, someone who had a moral compass, somebody who looked to the Word of God and and to God for what that standard should be in my life.

But that didn’t make life outside prison any easier. Smith slammed into the harsh realities after his release. He and his wife couldn’t live in government housing because he was a felon, and he had to beg for his first job making 6 dollars an hour.

But all that reading—and a lot of hard work—eventually paid off.

SMITH: Fast forward, I am blessed by God to be extremely wealthy mostly because of real estate. I also achieved great success in business, but that's not because I'm just some smarter-than-average person. It's because I saw those challenges, and I read and I took on those challenges.

BROWN: He also jumped into prison ministry, working with corrections leaders across the country. President Donald Trump pardoned Smith during his first term.

Now, he’s excited to put all his experiences to work as second-in-command at the nation’s top corrections agency. He says the Bureau of Prisons is gearing up to make some big changes.

SMITH: One of those things are partnerships with our nonprofits and agencies throughout the country. You know, we just met with one of the largest prison ministry nonprofits that has been trying to work with this agency for a lot of years.

Prison Fellowship is one of the ministries that’s been working for years to get more of its programming into federal prisons.

HEATHER RICE-MINUS: Things like our Prison Fellowship Academy, which lasts over a year, about 500 hours worth of curriculum.

REICHARD: Heather Rice-Minus is the president and CEO of Prison Fellowship. The organization has decades of experience working in state prisons.

RICE-MINUS: We actually ask for people to live together in a unit. So it functions very much like a faith-based dorm. You don't have to be a Christian to be part of the program, but we are teaching from a Christian worldview.

During his first term, President Trump signed the bipartisan First Step Act, a prison reform bill that let certain federal inmates earn time off their sentences if they completed rehabilitation programs. But Rice-Minus told WORLD the outside agency hired to vet those programs repeatedly rejected Prison Fellowship’s Christian programming.

RICE-MINUS: The only programs that have been deemed evidence-based under the First Step Act by the BOP seem to be their internal programs, programs that they run themselves. And so I'm really excited about the new leadership there. I think that it's really a new day.

BROWN: Deputy Director Smith says the agency is committed to getting out of the way so nonprofits can do what they do best.

SMITH: This is work that's already being done all across the country. Great work whose results speak for themselves. I think really, my job in this role is to just say, “You’re welcome here.” That's it. And then make sure that we move through any bureaucratic obstacles that are going to stand in the way of these ministries operating the way that they should.

He also hopes to encourage churches to play a larger role in the re-entry process.

SMITH: We're talking about ways, through the White House faith office and others, of how we can really look at some major partnerships where churches might say, Hey, we're gonna sponsor this prison in a unique way.

While some prisoners have committed crimes that require them to be separated from society for the rest of their lives, most will return to their former homes. The Government Accountability Office says about 45 percent of people released from federal prison will be rearrested.

That’s why Smith says the work of reintegrating prisoners into society should not begin when they leave prison.

SMITH: If somebody's gonna see society again one day, and in our system, it's about 97% that will, then we need to begin them on programs day one. It's my hope and goal, frankly, to help Congress and our general society see the importance of the role of corrections in our society. It's not enough to just say, Hey, we're locking them up.

REICHARD: Smith says his Biblical beliefs have shaped how he understands the purpose of the prison system.

SMITH: I think that the Scriptures are very clear on discipline and the reason for that. It even talks about how we cast those away from us in the church in hopes to restore them. I think the Bible is the perfect picture that explains how restoration and accountability both happen.

If you’d like to read more from Addie’s interview with Deputy Director Smith you can find a longer version in the September issue of WORLD Magazine.

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.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Tomorrow: Culture Friday with John Stonestreet. And, reviewer Max Belz revisits a 50-year old classic story about a shark and the team that’s supposed to hunt it down. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is Biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible records people “bringing even infants to him that [Jesus] might touch them. And when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them to him, saying, ‘Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.’” —Luke 18:15-17

Go now in grace and peace.

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