Group seeks constitutional protection for flag

Lyle Carstens often gets emotional when he talks about Old Glory.

“The flag represents the United States,” said Carstens, a Navy veteran and one of the Eastern Washington district commanders for the American Legion. “It represents freedom. It just galls me whenever someone wants to take that representation and destroy it.”

Even allowing it to touch the ground would be considered a sacrilege, said the Spokane Valley resident.

Carstens’ deep reverence for the flag has spurred him and others to push for a constitutional amendment that they say would protect their ensign from “physical acts of desecration.”

This week, the American Legion and the roughly 140 other organizations that make up the Indianapolis-based Citizens Flag Alliance launched a nationwide ad campaign to persuade U.S. senators to approve a joint resolution known as the flag amendment.

The measure has already been approved by the House of Representatives but isn’t scheduled for a vote in the Senate until later this month. The alliance’s efforts also come just a week before Flag Day, a national commemoration of the adoption of the U.S. flag in 1777.

“Unfortunately, this country doesn’t have the patriotism we had during World War II and the Korean War,” said Carstens, 64. “We had it during 9/11, but it has since waned considerably.”

Nearly seven out of 10 Washington state residents say that physically desecrating the flag isn’t an appropriate expression of freedom of speech, according to poll results released by Wednesday by the Citizens Flag Alliance.

One in four said it was.

“The ability to express your views, even in ways that are very offensive to most people, is a basic part of our democratic system,” said Doug Honig, a spokesman for the state’s American Civil Liberties Union chapter.

A 1989 U.S. Supreme Court decision in a Texas case ruled that burning a flag is constitutionally protected free speech.

“On its face it’s absurd,” retired Army Maj. Gen. Patrick Brady said during a press conference in Olympia. “You can’t burn a flag with your tongue.” Brady and others say it’s time to change the Constitution.

“The people have a solemn obligation to correct the errors of our government,” said Brady, an Army helicopter pilot who’s heading up the Flag Alliance campaign.

To amend the Constitution, Brady said, the measure would have to pass with a two-thirds vote in each house of Congress, plus a 75 percent vote from the states. The Flag Alliance said that just one more senator’s vote is needed for the measure to pass this month. The group is trying to pressure Washington senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell to vote yes.

“Rescue our flag. Know that you will be entering a minefield,” Brady told a gathering of about 40 veterans and supporters on the steps of the state Capitol Wednesday. “The media will ridicule you. Politicians will trivialize the issue … Be comforted by the fact that America is with you.”

Neither of Washington’s senators supports such a constitutional amendment.

Sen. Cantwell “understands everyone’s strong feelings and can’t stand the thought of someone burning the American flag,” said spokeswoman Charla Neuman. “At the same time, she would not want to vote to amend the Constitution. She sees that as a sacred document that shouldn’t be amended unless absolutely necessary.”

Murray said in a statement that she, too, is personally offended by flag-burning. But when a similar vote came up shortly after she became a senator, she said, she consulted with her father, a World War II combat veteran. Her father told her that he’d fought for American freedoms “and that includes the rights of Americans to express themselves for what they believe in.” So she voted no.

Cantwell’s Republican opponent, Mike McGavick, said he would vote yes. Flag desecration, he said, “is simply a hateful act, and we have a right to outlaw it.”

Flag-burning is one of several issues that President Bush and the Senate’s Republican leaders are raising to stir up the Republican base, some Democrats say. With the congressional year fast coming to a close, McGavick’s support of such a move “shows he’d be nothing more than a rubber stamp for Bush and the failed Republican leadership … that does nothing to address the needs of ordinary Washingtonians,” said state Democratic party spokesman Kelly Steele.

This week in Spokane, the Citizens Flag Alliance paid for two large, nearly full-page, color ads urging voters to put the pressure on Murray and Cantwell.

One ad featuring Laura Youngblood, who was widowed when her husband died in Iraq, focused on the significance of the American flag at the military funeral. “Now everytime I see the flag, I think of him. And sometimes at night when my son goes to bed he kisses his father goodnight – he kisses the American flag.”

Her words and photograph brought tears to the eyes of 77-year-old Mary Ann O’Hare of Spokane, whose late husband also served in the military. “I really identified with that woman,” she said, recalling how she, too, received the flag during her husband’s funeral. “My generation is so put out with the way they treat the flag these days. I’m tired of the disrespect. When I grew up, we treated the flag with almost a religious feeling.”

But most offensive to supporters of the flag amendment are the intentional “acts of desecration” including the burning of Old Glory. Last Fourth of July, members of the Spokane Lack of Action Committee set fire to flags at a deserted skate park in Spokane in an attempt to “create awareness and discussion about current political activities.” While their actions were denounced by some, they also were defended by those advocating free speech.

“They’re expressing an opinion,” said Renee Roehl of Spokane, a poet and owner of a small wild mushroom business. “It had nothing to do with desecration. …

“Do I advocate burning a flag? No. Ironically, passing an amendment to protect the flag stomps on both free expression and American liberties.”