This morning Tump tweeted:
>Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag - if they do, there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!
So he's, essentially, ignorant about American civics. It's a shame that he's ignorant, and more of a shame that a person ignorant on that topic got elected. That said, the courts are supposed to limit the effect of such ignorance about how the system works, and about what our rights are.
If the courts start failing in that role, that will be cause for very serious concern.
Courts are mostly able to act after-the-fact of alleged violations; by the time they fail to do their job, it will be way too late to start being concerned.
If the person gets arrested, do they get prosecuted, or does the prosecutor know and follow the relevant court rulings?
If the person gets prosecuted, does it come to trial, or does the judge throw it out?
If it comes to trial, does the person get convicted, or does the judge or jury rule that this behavior is protected by the First Amendment?
At every step, the flag burner should be home free. If they wind up facing a year in jail or losing their citizenship, that is not just time to start being concerned - it's time to start thinking seriously about leaving the country. But I'm more optimistic than that. I think, however, that it will be interesting to see how far it goes before it's thrown out, to see exactly how broken things currently are...
But under Trump there's no need to be a dissident, just burning the flag is enough. How lame is that?
The fact that the democrats and republicans produced such like minded candidates is the more worrying aspect.
While one can certainly argue that there is little merit in specially punishing that particular mechanism of achieving those unlawful ends, that clearly is not the same thing (or even a similar thing) to a general ban on flag burning.
Titles of laws are rarely accurate indications of their substance.
Does a white college educated young person burn the flag with no consequences, and everyone else gets hit with intimidation ?
Can these actors be unfair and express biases not in the text of the law? Sure. But that's more an argument for policies to address that problem than it is an argument against additional criminalization of a subset of a category of generally already-criminal acts. (And against which, I should add, there are plenty of other arguments.)
Anyone on the left who disagrees with this argument? Re-evaluate your own principles then, in a way that doesn't assume "my values are right and yours are wrong" in the context of a democratic republic.
Then again, why is burning the flag necessarily "hate speech". I would dare say that it's perfectly legitimate way to protest any abuses that are carried out presumably in the name of that flag - like, say, Gitmo or Patriot Act.
Except they absolutely didn't.