We will continue to react quickly and forcefully to any future attempts to restrict the protections of the First Amendment. We worked with veteran groups, religious leaders, and other Americans to highlight opposition to the amendment and lobby senators to vote down the proposals. He had doused a flag with kerosene in 1984 during the Republican convention in Dallas. The ACLU has led organizing efforts against legislative attempts to ban flag desecration, including fighting back recently proposed constitutional amendments in 2004, 2006, and 2011. Johnson, and the defendant was the same Gregory L. Nebraska Man Convicted of Hate Crime for Burning Lesbian Couple’s Gay Pride Flag: WATCH John Wright ApLeave a Comment Before stealing a Gay Pride flag from a lesbian couple’s home in. Experience shows that the way to fight political expression with which one disagrees is not to outlaw it, as Congress has repeatedly sought to do, but to express disapproval.
Supreme Court has affirmed and reaffirmed that the right to desecrate the flag is included in the Constitution’s protection of speech.įlag burning and desecration is offensive precisely because it is political.
Our democracy is strong because we tolerate all peaceful forms of expression, no matter how uncomfortable they make us feel or how much we disagree.
