Patriots And Protesters Should Take A Knee For The Constitution

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

By all means, let’s talk about patriotism and President Trump’s call for “respect for our Country, Flag and National Anthem.”

At a time when the American flag adorns everything from men’s boxers and women’s bikinis to beer koozies, bandannas and advertising billboards (with little outcry from the American public), and the National Anthem is sung by Pepper the Parrot during the Puppy Bowl, this conveniently timed outrage over disrespect for the country’s patriotic symbols rings somewhat hollow, detracts from more serious conversations that should be taking place about critical policy matters of state, and further divides the nation and ensures that “we the people” will not present a unified front to oppose the police state.

First off, let’s tackle this issue of respect or lack thereof for patriotic symbols.

As the U.S. Supreme Court has made clear, Americans have a right to abstain from patriotic demonstrations and/or actively protest that demonstration, for example, by raising one’s fist during the Pledge of Allegiance. Likewise, Americans have a First Amendment right to display, alter or destroy the U.S. flag as acts of symbolic protest speech.

In fact, in Street v. New York (1969), the Supreme Court held that the government may not punish a person for uttering words critical of the flag. The case arose after Sidney Street, hearing about the attempted murder of civil rights leader James Meredith in Mississippi, burned a 48-star American flag on a New York City street corner to protest what he saw as the government’s failure to protect Meredith. Upon being questioned about the flag, Street responded, “Yes; that is my flag; I burned it. If they let that happen to Meredith, we don’t need an American flag.”

In Spence v. Washington (1974), the Court ruled that the right to display the American flag with any mark or design upon it is a protected act of expression. The case involved a college student who had placed a peace symbol on a three by five foot American flag using removable black tape and displayed it upside down from his apartment window.

Finally, in Texas v. Johnson (1989), the Court held that flag burning was protected speech under the First Amendment.  The case arose from a demonstration near the site of the Republican National Convention in Dallas during which protesters marched through the streets, chanted political slogans, staged “die-ins” in front of several corporate offices to dramatize the consequences of nuclear war, and burned the flag as a means of political protest.

In other words, if freedom means anything, it means that those exercising their right to protest are showing the greatest respect for the principles on which this nation was founded: the right to free speech and the right to dissent. Clearly, the First Amendment to the Constitution assures Americans of the right to speak freely, assemble freely and protest (petition the government for a redress of grievances).

Whether those First Amendment activities take place in a courtroom or a classroom, on a football field or in front of the U.S. Supreme Court is not the issue: what matters is that Americans have a right—according to the spirit, if not always the letter, of the law—to voice their concerns without being penalized for it.

Second, let’s not confuse patriotism (love for or devotion to one’s country) with blind obedience to the government’s dictates. That is the first step towards creating an authoritarian regime.

One can be patriotic and love one’s country while at the same time disagreeing with the government or protesting government misconduct. Indeed, real patriots care enough to take a stand, speak out, protest and challenge the government whenever it steps out of line.

It’s not anti-American to be anti-war or anti-police misconduct or anti-racial discrimination, but it is anti-American to be anti-freedom.

America requires more than voters inclined to pay lip service to a false sense of patriotism. It requires doers—a well-informed and very active group of doers—if we are to have any chance of holding the government accountable and maintaining our freedoms.

After all, it was not idle rhetoric that prompted the Framers of the Constitution to begin with the words “We the people.”

This ultimate responsibility for maintaining our freedoms rests with the people.

Third, we need to stop acting as if showing “respect” for the country, flag and national anthem is more important than the freedoms they represent.

Listen: I served in the Army. I lived through the Civil Rights era. I came of age during the Sixties, when activists took to the streets to protest war and economic and racial injustice. As a constitutional lawyer, I defend people daily whose civil liberties are being violated, including high school students prohibited from wearing American flag t-shirts to school, allegedly out of a fear that it might be disruptive.

I understand the price that must be paid for freedom. None of the people I served with or marched with or represented put our lives or our liberties on the line for a piece of star-spangled cloth or a few bars of music: we took our stands and made our sacrifices because we believed we were fighting to maintain our freedoms and bring about justice for all Americans.

Love of country will sometimes entail carrying a picket sign or going to jail or taking a knee, if necessary, to preserve liberty and challenge injustice. And it will mean speaking up for those with whom you might disagree. Tolerance for dissent, we must remember, is a vital characteristic of the citizens of a democratic society.

The problems facing our generation are numerous and are becoming incredibly complex.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’re at a very crucial crossroads in American history. We have to be well-informed, not only about current events but well-versed in the basics of our rights and duties as citizens. If not, in perceived times of crisis, we may very well find ourselves in the clutches of a governmental system that is alien to everything for which America stands.

Therein is the menace to our freedoms.

So stop falling for the distractions. Stop allowing yourself to be fooled by propaganda and partisan politics. Stop acting as if the only thing worth getting outraged about is whether a bunch of football players stand or kneel for the National Anthem.

Stop being armchair patriots and start acting like foot soldiers for the Constitution.

Nationalists Turn Into Snowflakes, Put Out $3K Bounty For Woman’s Murder Over Her Free Speech

Never has unadulterated hypocrisy marched itself to the forefront on a silver platter more efficaciously than on Independence Day in the United States — that is, until 2017, when my online friend decided to test the public mettle — by urinating on a Chinese-made American flag.

Oh, yes. She did.

And thankfully so — exercise of rights ultimately staves off their evisceration. Without occasional tests of the protections granted all U.S. citizens, those boundaries of protection shrink, unabated — because, if you don’t value freedom of expression, just wait until expressing yourself freely cannot be achieved without a consequent stint behind bars.

In that spirit, my friend, Emily Lance, placed a flag on the rim of a toilet on the 4th of July, and — using a device allowing women to stand and urinate — let loose, unleashing a torrent of urine against the Stars and Stripes as a friend videotaped the immediately-viral act.

“Fuck your nationalism,” the dedicated activist narrated on video since deleted by Facebook and YouTube, as the song, “Night Moves” by Bob Seger and The Silver Bullet Band, played in the background. “Fuck your country. Fuck your stupid fucking flag.”

Offended? You should be.

You should be offended that the U.S. military maintains a presence in 150 of 196 nations on the planet. Offended the CIA employed the grossest human rights abuses known when it psychologically, emotionally, and physically tortured detainees — even though that method has been proven utterly ineffective. Offended the Authorization for the Use of Military Force granted a blank slate for perpetual war anywhere on the globe. Offended the most heinous terrorist organization yet to manifest only did so because the West sought and hoped for a caliphate of terrorists. Offended millions of people abandoned their homes for flimsy life rafts, risking their otherwise uneventful lives to escape relentless American and allied bombs.

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You should be offended our prisons incarcerate more per capita than any other nation — fascist dictatorships, included — on the planet. Offended the police, with seemingly endless authority over our daily lives, kill with nary a consequence, even in questionable situations. Offended free speech has been forgotten to cater to those too sensitive to bear it. Offended protest is being criminalized in a growing number of states. Offended medical choice isn’t an option in a nation claiming to value choice. Offended acceptable expression has been narrowed so severely, your right to redress grievances has been summarily erased from the books — and from the hemp-based paper on which those rights were putatively enshrined.

You should be offended with your own damnable hypocrisy — calling for the bodily harm of someone committing a nonviolent act against a symbol — rather than voting out the pols excusing the wholesale murder of innocents inside the bounds of sovereign lands.

Instead, you’re offended that bodily waste met striped and starred fabric — made in China, no less.

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This hypocrisy — not our farcical shreds of freedom — is why we’re so hated around the planet. In fact, it’s why blowback — not terrorism — comprises our greatest threat.

Those indelible impressions the U.S. has effected on the world — not to mention innumerable other unnamed iterations — comprise just a fraction of the motivation to carry out the one act an otherwise helpless citizen might choose to force the spotlight on the issues: desecration of the flag.

So, that’s what Emily Lance did — she chose the symbol of pain for millions around the planet who experience the full brunt of American exceptionalism to focus the rage of living only symbolically free in the one nation pompously regurgitating liberty, but failing to live up to the hype.

To call the act inflammatory would belie the altogether appalling backlash instantaneously generated the moment video of the July 4th stunt was posted to Facebook — a reaction so horrifically hypocritical, the exercise of free speech has since extended into death threats to Lance’s family members.

Threats to dissect Emily with knives, bludgeon her body, and even a $3,000 bounty for her head, rumored to be posted to Craigslist, now dot the activist’s Facebook timeline — as if she injured each individual in cold-hearted glee.

But she didn’t — she exercised an albeit fraught freedom and catapulted an astonishing hypocrisy into the world spotlight.

As furious former and current service members, their families, and other devotees to the symbolism in Old Glory crawled out of the self-aggrandizing, misbegotten cracks to wish death upon an otherwise unknown person on the Internet, Lance — obviously no shrinking violet — wrote in a post to Facebook,

“Freedom (of speech/expression) means that I’m entitled to do and say as I please, EVEN if you don’t like it, so long as I am not physically hurting someone – and no, your precious feelings don’t count, that’s your own problem. What don’t you people understand? You’re celebrating freedom while damning me for doing the same. You can’t have it both ways. FREEDOM OR NONE. Practice what you preach or shut the fuck up.”

She has a point.

Indeed, while the bulk of condemnation centered around disrespect for the flag, critics widely missed that Lance’s act not only falls under constitutional protection, desecrating the symbol of the nation embodies the freedom putatively defended by the military. Those threatening death and mutilation against the woman bold enough to express displeasure with the direction of this hopelessly self-serving government would do well to re-examine what the United States allegedly stands for — freedom.

Perhaps a nation born of the blood of the land’s original inhabitants and built upon the involuntary toil of enslaved Africans and others could never comprehend freedom as a concept on which to base its existence — though, perhaps, it should.

In propaganda — advertisements, corporate news, and Hollywood cinema — the United States can do no wrong. In reality, it rarely does right by those under its control — much less, those under the bombs dropped so readily.

Testing American mettle means teasing the bounds of acceptability and tolerance — what better way to test its willingness to stand for the ideals of freedom than by destroying the symbol so dear to so many.

Instead, Lance merely proved the laughable hypocrisy in Americans’ claiming the nation the freest of all while calling for her murder for expressing a freedom apparently untenable to the national conscience.

We must face, as citizens of these once-United States, the crimes of our government for the brazen reduction of people to commodities those wrongs encompass — failure to do so engenders only militancy in the cause of knocking the imperialist empire from its self-appointed pedestal.

This nation is not exceptional — it’s ordinary. Worse, it’s complicit in the misery of billions, and — no matter how extraordinary the somnambulant American public finds itself — this shameful fact cannot be extricated from our national identity.

We are not gods. We haven’t mastered life. Our government and military commit the worst atrocities in our name — yet, people are enraged about a piece of cloth — one not even manufactured in the United States?

To say priorities have been compromised would be gross mischaracterization and understatement.

“People are wishing illness, harm, and suffering upon me over a piece of fabric,” Lance later tellingly asserted online. “People are willing to MURDER someone over a flag. It’s so sad that people don’t realize how brainwashed they are. I’m gross for peeing on a symbol? LOOK AT YOURSELVES. You people epitomize all that is foul.”

No matter how much so many wish it so, the American flag is only a symbol — however imbued with personal meaning for any individual — the flag is just a symbol. You cannot equate military service — even the ultimate price — with a piece of colored cloth.

Not when the provocative among us aren’t offered the same platform to express distaste as those expressing pride.

The true beauty of our protected freedoms in this land are most clearly seen when someone expresses themselves in a way or on a topic on which we don’t necessarily agree — then, and only then, is its foundation and strength actually proven.

This experience proves that foundation — and the flag flying emptily above it — deserve to be condemned.