Ignorant Republican is worried about ... flag-burning

Seriously. The US may be dealing with terrorism and possible epidemics and a crashing economy and unemployment rates and criminality and civil rights issues and any number of critical problems, yet Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa is concerned about how burning flags is a desecration of said flags. Because that's quite important these days, flag-burnings.

We think that burning a flag is desecration of the flag and that we should not desecrate the flag that there's been a lot of bloodshed by our veterans and people in uniform to protect the flag as a symbol of our country.

So it simply says that desecration of a flag is not protected by the First Amendment because the First Amendment was not written -- if you read the debate in 1790 -- the First Amendment was not written to protect nonverbal speech. It was to protect verbal speech and, more importantly, political speech.

So you weren't put in jail when you talked against the government as you were in England that the particular time. And so we want to make sure that we get the Constitution back to its original intent before the Supreme Court screwed it up.

Two points come to mind reading this inanity. First of all, is how he's just proven himself to be highly ignorant ragarding the First Amendment. No, it does not only protect speech. Any scholar or legal expert on the matter will tell you that it was written to also cover symbolic acts, which can of course be just as libelous, if not more, than spoken words. Flag-burning fits in this category of "symbolic" just fine and dandy.

And second ... who freakin' cares? A burning a flag is not burning a country, or its people, or what it stands for. What is flag-burning? It's setting fire to a stupid piece of cloth. Nothing more. Anyone who honestly cries or rages when tissue goes up in smoke has some serious overzealousness issues to work through, especially in this modern day and age when we have considerably harsher realities to deal with than disrespecting a stupid flag.

(via Dispatches from the Culture Wars)