President Trump wants to penalize anyone who burns the American flag. After initially announcing his intent - apparently before being told the Supreme Court has already said burning the flag is protected under the free expression clause of the First Amendment - Trump said he wishes to criminalize such behavior if it violates existing state and local laws.

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.

"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” is usually thought of as a religious word. It means “the state or quality of being holy, sacred, or saintly.” Imputing holiness to a piece of cloth (unless perhaps it is the burial cloth of Jesus, known as the Shroud of Turin) is a form of idolatry, defined as “the worship of idols.”

Yes, the flag stands for something, but it is not that something.

In two cases — Texas v. Johnson (1989) and United States v. Eichman (1990) — the court held that the right to protest the flag outweighed the government’s interest in protecting its symbolic role. Therefore, efforts to ban flag burning have been declared unconstitutional.

The president’s statement is clearly a political one, designed to keep his base (and cable TV hosts and their guests) fired up. There doesn’t appear to be 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.

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.

Again, this is a political move by the president, something like adding “under God” to the pledge, which President Dwight Eisenhower did in 1954. Previously, school children had recited the pledge that was originally written in 1892 without any reference to God. The move to add God to the pledge occurred during the “red scare,” when many American politicians wanted to assert the superiority of American capitalism over Soviet communism, which conservatives, especially, regarded as godless.

Better to mock and isolate those few misguided 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, unless the flag might have been made in China! As for teaching the superiority of capitalism over other economic and political systems, the New York City mayor’s race could use a dose of that as a self-declared “Democrat-Socialist” appears on the verge of victory in the November election.

To whom or to what would a mayor Zohran Mamdani pledge his allegiance?

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