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Not one to relinquish his constitutional rights, Johnson was arrested in 2016, outside the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where he burned a flag in protest “because,” he said, “America was never great.” A judge dismissed his case, and he later won a $225,000 settlement from the city. Johnson was accused of “desecration of a venerated object,” convicted and sentenced to one year in jail and fined $2,000.Īfter the Supreme Court overturned his conviction, Congress passed the Flag Protection Act, which, again, was ruled unconstitutional by the court. later wrote in his majority opinion, “though several witnesses testified that they had been seriously offended.” troops were sent in 1983, in what many believed was an effort to divert attention from the bombing deaths of at least 240 troops and personnel at a Marine barracks in Lebanon.Īs the flag burned, protesters chanted, “America, the red, white and blue, we spit on you.” backing of wars against leftist governments in Central America and also the invasion of Grenada, a tiny Caribbean island where 2,000 U.S. Gregory Lee “Joey” Johnson, a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, poured kerosene on a flag that someone had ripped from a flagpole, and burned it. Johnson, arose from an incident that occurred in Dallas at the 1984 Republican National Convention. Spence hung the flag to protest the killing, in 1970, of four Kent State University anti-war protesters by Ohio National Guardsmen.īy 1989, the court had rendered invalid all state and federal laws aimed at protecting the flag from protesters. The Supreme Court began to challenge those laws in 1974, when it ruled that a University of Washington student named Harold Spence did not violate the law by hanging an American flag from his dorm window upside down with peace symbols taped to it. Eventually, 48 states also banned flag desecration. It’s quite possible my inner arsonist would burst into view.įlag burning is one of those culture war issues that raises its ugly head every few years.īack in 1968, Congress passed the Federal Flag Desecration Law after Vietnam War protesters destroyed American flags.
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That form of protest is not my style.īut if I happened to find myself alone with a box of matches and a Confederate flag? Indeed, as painful as it must have been for him not to be king, Scalia cast the deciding vote in the landmark 1989 5-4 ruling that declared that flag burning is protected under the 1st Amendment.Įven as ardent a conservative as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has said he supports the rights of flag burners: “No act of speech,” he wrote in 2006, “is so obnoxious that it merits tampering with our First Amendment…Surely we are strong enough to withstand a few degenerate attention-seekers.”Īs angry as this country makes me at times, I would never burn an American flag. If states would pass a “very powerful flag burning statute” with “strong punishment,” he promised to “back you 100%” and mused that the current members of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority “will accept that.” Last year, when two Republican senators introduced a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning, he tweeted his support: “A no brainer!”Ī couple of weeks ago, in a call with governors, he brought it up again, according to the Washington Post. In 2016, he suggested that anyone who burns an American flag should be imprisoned and lose their citizenship. It wasn’t the first time Trump has injected flag burning into the national political conversation.
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It was another cheap and easy chunk of red meat tossed to the anemic crowd on Saturday night: “We ought to come up with legislation that if you burn the American flag, you go to jail for one year!” he said, addressing Oklahoma’s two Republican senators, who basked in his attention. That would have required compassion or empathy.īut rail against an imaginary issue like flag burning? Sure, why not? President Trump did not offer a word of comfort for victims of police brutality, nor for those who have lost their lives in the COVID-19 pandemic, during his rally in Tulsa, Okla., last weekend.