Then a United States Senator for New York, Clinton co-sponsored the Flag Protection Act of 2005.
What many may not know is that a decade ago, Hillary Clinton called for a similar punishment.
Gay flag burning is bad free#
Lee Rowland is a Senior Staff Attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.Ĩ6 thoughts on “Flag Burning is Free Speech” No matter how much you bellyfeel that duckspeak. The alternate reality that Trump tweeted about just can’t happen as long as our Constitution gets in the way. Scalia was correct - that way lies only tyranny.įortunately, our First Amendment rights have deep and strong roots in the federal courts, and it’s going to take a lot more than uneducated tweets to uproot these core liberties. (Indeed, while Charles Manson and the Unabomber may rightly be rotting in jail, I haven’t heard a single suggestion that either complete their sentences stripped of their citizenship.) As the Supreme Court correctly noted, “Citizenship is no light trifle.” It is no mere pawn to use as punishment, let alone a tool to control the political beliefs of the citizenry. As our Supreme Court affirmed nearly 50 years ago, it is unconstitutional to strip any American of her citizenship without consent - including for even the most heinous crimes. But he quickly added that because we live in a constitutional democracy, such punishments were off the table: “ I mean, that was the main kind of speech that tyrants would seek to suppress.” That quote now seems quite prescient just a few short years later.īut failing to recognize the First Amendment’s protection for political speech was only one of the two constitutional impossibilities contained in Trump’s tweet. Trump claims to respect highly, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, explained that if he were “king,” he’d happily imprison those who burned the U.S. That means this speech can’t be censored by the government, and it can’t be made a crime.Īnd you don’t have to take it just from me. Flag burning, like other forms of dissent, is political speech that is fully protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. No, President-elect Trump, you can’t get locked up or lose your American citizenship for political speech.įirst, one of the founding principles of American democracy is our tolerance of peaceful protest. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine anyone committing two worse constitutional errors in 140 characters or less. Constitution, however, prevents both of those ideas from becoming reality. This tweet offers not one but two ideas that are staggeringly wrong from a constitutional point of view: that peaceful protest can be punished by the government and that stripping someone of their American citizenship is an appropriate response to dissent. The idea that the government could use citizenship as a punishment for political speech is not simply unconstitutional, but fundamentally un-American. Trump tweeted that anyone who burns a flag should be jailed or even stripped of their U.S. How can we live in sin when we have died to it? To a degree that flag, put on a church in support, is representing licentiousness, when in fact God has set us free from sin's dominion in our lives.President-elect Donald J. Yes, we welcome sinners, but we do not promote those lifestyles or encourage them. So we ought not to pretend that we support sin in our lives when Christ paid for us to be victorious, to reign in life. We are changed, made into a new creation. So while we embrace sinners, we are also realize that God gives us victory. Like in my jest, are we to then start putting up other symbols representing sins that we will "embrace?" Yes we are all sinners, but hey, God can give you victory and allow it to not dominate your life by His grace. I get that they are trying to not condemn people, or alienate them away from the Gospel (that is commendable), but you don't put up a flag in support of a particular sin.
Maybe they should get a pole out in front to support strippers (figuratively?) with a keg of beer on the side in support of drunks?