Flag Burning Amendment is a Waste of Time

The Senate is debating a Constitutional amendment to ban the burning of the American flag. While I don't like flag burning any more than the next guy, I don't think this is an appropriate use of the Constitutional amendment process. It smells a lot more like a political stunt designed to stir up emotions in an election year.

James Taranto pretty much sums up my feelings on the matter:

No doubt you are dying to know where this column stands on the flag-desecration amendment. The answer is, we are against it. Our view is that the Supreme Court got it right in 1989: Insofar as desecrating the flag is an act of political expression, it is protected by the First Amendment. (The objection that it isn't "speech" is overly literal. What we're doing now--causing pixels to form meaningful patterns on thousands of computer screens--isn't exactly speech either, but we like to think the First Amendment protects it from government interference.)

Burning the flag is a stupid and ugly act, but there is something lovely and enlightened about a regime that tolerates it in the name of freedom. And of course it has the added benefit of making it easier to spot the idiots.

I don't really think we want to join the list of countries that ban flag burning. They're not really the collection of folks with which we want to associate. I think we can do better than align our political speech rights with Cuba, China, Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

UPDATE: The amendment failed by one vote. Now, back to work on the important stuff.