Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 26, 1990 TAG: 9006260417
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Bob Willis Associate Editor
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
While the rest of us children in our red-clay rural Georgia school stood, first thing in the morning, to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, Omer Lee stayed stolidly in his seat.
The teacher thought he didn't know the words; she explained the ceremony and gave him a copy of the pledge. Omer Lee was unmoved. As we learned later, he was a Jehovah's Witness. "I don't go for this worshiping the flag," he said.
I don't remember what finally happened. I do recall that at assembly Mr. Tarrant, the principal, without naming Omer Lee, told everyone forcefully why it was important to pledge allegiance to the flag. That was during World War II, and those who didn't express fealty to the United States of America were automatically suspect. I heard of instances where aliens in this country were forced to kneel and kiss the flag.
For years, I thought that Omer Lee - faithful to a religion that makes Jehovah's rule supreme over that of temporal governments - had the wrong idea about the flag. We pledged allegiance to a flag and to a country for which it stands; we didn't worship a banner.
Now I begin to think that, for many of us, Omer Lee was close to the truth.
Consider the wording of the proposed amendment to the Constitution: "The Congress and the states shall have power to prohibit physical desecration of the flag of the United States." Desecration is taking away sacredness. Something sacred, says Webster's New World Dictionary, is "consecrated to a god or deity; holy . . . of or connected with religion or religious rites . . . regarded with the same respect and reverence accorded holy things . . . ."
Omer Lee would have understood.
I have heard it said that the United States has a secular religion. So it would seem from the furor over a few misguided souls who would put the torch to the flag or otherwise treat it with contempt.
Did the framers of the proposed amendment simply choose the wrong words? Was the reference to sacredness inappropriate?
I don't think so. No matter what the legal terminology, something akin to religious belief is involved in the present effort to amend our basic law. Trying to dictate a degree of reverence, respect, or whatever for a symbol is an attempt to impose a particular set of beliefs or attitudes. Done by government, it is akin to thought control.
That is totally contrary to what America is about. I too love our flag; I too am upset and angered when I see someone debase it. But that is a form of dissent, and dissent - difference of opinion - is supposed to be tolerated in this country. For the past 200 years, the Bill of Rights has guaranteed it.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which threw out that state's flag-burning statute last year, understands our law and our traditions: "Recognizing that the right to differ is the centerpiece of First Amendment freedoms, a government cannot mandate by fiat a feeling of unity. Therefore, [that government] cannot carve out a symbol of unity and prescribe a set of approved messages to be associated with that symbol."
Even the four U.S. Supreme Court justices who voted last week to uphold the federal law against flag-burning denounced, in their dissent, "those leaders who seem to advocate compulsory worship of the flag even by those whom it offends, or who seem to manipulate the symbol of national purpose into a pretext for partisan disputes about meaner ends."
They could have been talking about President Bush, who has declared that burning the flag "endangers the fabric of our country." As well as demagoguery, that is utter and deplorable nonsense.
In the course of more than 200 years, this nation has endured such traumas as civil war, social strains caused by immigration and strange ideologies in the 19th century, two Red scares in this century, the Great Depression, two world wars, and the rending division of the Vietnam War. We survived all that, the nation's fabric intact, without White House or Congress trying to raise the flag to sacred status or tampering with the Bill of Rights. With all our might, we should strive to avoid such needless and dangerous reaction now.
by CNB