With Senate Joint Resolution 12 ("The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States") coming up for a vote today, a lot of debate will center on whether or not people have a First Amendment right to burn a piece of cloth to protest the policies of their government. That debate will take a lot of heat off of Iraq timetables, government spying on your phone calls and financial records, an economic slowdown, inadequate disaster preparedness as hurricane season ramps up again, et cetera. Which is, at its heart, the main purpose of this debate.
But the flag-desecration amendment does something else, too. It enshrines in our country's foundational document the existance of "thought-crimes".
Thought crime, for those who don't know, is a phrase from Orwell's 1984 in which mere thoughts were crimes. This flag amendment is a prime example of this.
As many who are following the debate on the flag amendment are aware, the proper way to dispose of a flag, according to the Federal Flag Code is by burning it. Therefore, burning in and of itself is not only inappropriate where the flag is concerned, but it is actually the federally sanctioned method of flag disposal. It's highly unlikely that the flag amendment would change the preferred method of flag disposal, meaning that some other criteria would be necessary to determine if the flag has been "desecrated".
So a boy scout burning the flag to dispose of it is okay, but a demonstrator burning the flag to protest the government is not. The actions themselves are not considerably different -- both are burning the flag. The only difference between one flag burning and the other is the thoughts in the head of the people doing the burning. And based on those thoughts alone, one will be a crime and the other will not.
The day such an amendment is added to the Constitution of this great nation, we will lose a large part of what makes this country so great to begin with. The flag will represent a great deal less than it does today.
And I don't think that burning the flag would be an unreasonable protest of that new reality.... prohibited or not.