Putting Out Fires

Mark Steyn writes an absolutely brilliant analysis of why a flag-burning amendment is unnecessary. Here's my favorite part...

Banning flag desecration flatters the desecrators and suggests that the flag of this great republic is a wee delicate bloom that has to be protected. It's not. It gets burned because it's strong. I'm a Canadian and one day, during the Kosovo war, I switched on the TV and there were some fellows jumping up and down in Belgrade burning the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack. Big deal, seen it a million times. But then to my astonishment, some of those excitable Serbs produced a Maple Leaf from somewhere and started torching that. Don't ask me why -- we had a small contribution to the Kosovo bombing campaign but evidently it was enough to arouse the ire of Slobo's boys. I've never been so proud to be Canadian in years. I turned the sound up to see if they were yelling ''Death to the Little Satan!'' But you can't have everything.

That's the point: A flag has to be worth torching. When a flag gets burned, that's not a sign of its weakness but of its strength. If you can't stand the heat of your burning flag, get out of the superpower business. It's the left that believes the state can regulate everyone into thought-compliance. The right should understand that the battle of ideas is won out in the open.

That last line explains why the left struggles in our new information-obsessed society. More important, it tells the right why it should avoid the same type of trap.

Having respect for our flag is important, and it ticks me off when others burn it. But those who burn the flag, as Steyn notes, show us their true colors and inability to craft persuasive arguments. We should rightly condemn them for their lack of civility and class, but criminalizing their conduct seems unnecessary and wrong in a free society, especially when these folks have managed to trivialize themselves.