Flagging a National Symbol

On Tuesday the Senate came within three votes of amending the Bill of Rights, which turns 204 years old today, for the first time in U.S. history. You might not have known it from the scarce coverage in the media. Unless, say, you were a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union who believes deeply in the free speech clause of the First Amendment and how it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court.

Admittedly, despite the significance placed on a flag-desecration amendment by incorrigible liberals like myself, only three incidents of flag-burning in 1994 and none in 1993 make the issue seem sufficiently remote and theoretical not to deserve the kind of attention garnered by the fragile peace in Bosnia or even the federal budget debate.

Still, the recent discussion of the flag-desecration amendment has brought to the fore two very different conceptions of America that are reverberating through the halls of Congress and over the presidential campaign trail. In sound bites and news conferences, the debate has adopted a superficial guise.

Liberals have argued that the First Amendment is too important to be revised because of something as rare as flag-burning. Conservatives have responded that the burning of the flag does not deserve standing as "speech" and that the American people should have the right to make laws against it if they so desire. But there is an undercurrent to this debate, one that legislators have rarely vocalized in their passing jabs and floor speeches.

Members of the conservative camp, which is inhabited by the overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans and all the Republican presidential candidates (Steve Forbes has no official position), believe that there is something fundamentally sacred about the flag. They believe it should be placed above the denigration that other symbols are subject to in our country.

The liberal camp, populated largely by Democrats, believes that there is no symbol of our national unity and sovereignty so important that it should be deemed sacred. In fact, the notion of a sacred national symbol conflicts, they say, with part of what makes America special in the first place. A flag-burning amendment devalues both the symbol and what is symbolized: part of what makes the flag worthy of respect is the fact that we have the right to burn it.

It's difficult for this incurable liberal to understand what vision of the United States the conservative camp could possibly be using to reach its conclusions. I tend to take it as a basic fact about America that we are free to speak our minds, especially when it comes to politics. There are no taboos here; there is nothing so special that it cannot be discussed, questioned, and criticized. How can conservatives ignore such a significant part of what makes ours the great nation that it is?

But amendment supporters are not without a response to this criticism. Most of those who understand this objection maintain that the flag is so crucially special, so venerable, that it needs to be consecrated just the same.

Such supporters either want to mold the flag into a religious icon or are making a mistake that reminds me when--at age seven--I thought that war was a giant game of capture the flag. Motivated by a misunderstanding of the lyrics of the national anthem, I believed that the side first to remove the opponent's flag and replace it with its own was the winner.

Fortunately, my mother corrected my false impression by explaining in so many words that the flag is merely a symbol that stands for the nation. It is not itself the physical embodiment of the sovereignty of the country, she explained; there is an important distinction to be made between symbols and what is being symbolized. Of course, my mother is also a liberal.

The other possible rationale for near-unanimous Republican support is that conservatives know better but are caving into political considerations. There's no proof of this, but who could blame them. Minutes after the vote, the Citizens Flag Alliance, the coalition of 100 lobbying groups promoting the flag-burning amendment, sent out a press-release stating only. "See you in November." Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee warned. "The amendment is not going to go away," and tied its failure to opposition from President Clinton. Hatch vows to bring it up again in the next Congress.

It must be difficult for any national politician to resist simultaneously neutralizing an explosive campaign issue and siding with three-quarters of the American people.

But if history repeats itself, the flag-amendment issue will have little resonance in the minds of voters come November. After the amendment's last run through Congress in May 1990, only five months before the election, Democrats gained seats in both houses, and not one Democrat lost a Senate seat While the electorate has come down repeatedly and overwhelmingly on the wrong side of the issue, at least it has had the sense not to vote for candidates on the basis of their support for the flag-burning amendment alone.