Captain Collins:
[addressing the assembled crew of the USS “San Pablo”]
Today we begin cruising to show the flag on Tungting Lake and the Hunan Rivers. I want all honors rendered smartly. At home in America, when today reaches them, it’ll be Flag Day. For us who wear the uniform, every day is Flag Day. It is said there will be no more wars. We must pretend to believe that. But when war comes, It is we who will take the first shock, and buy time with our lives. It is we who keep the faith. We serve the flag. The trade we all follow is the give-and-take of death. It is for that purpose that the people of America maintain us. Any one of us who believes he has a job like any other, for which he draws a money wage, is a thief of the food he eats, and a trespasser in the bunk in which he lies down to sleep.
Screenplay: The Sand Pebbles (1966)
Texas v. Johnson (1989), is a 5-4 decision that crossed ideological lines, in which the Supreme Court found unconstitutional all anti-flag desecration laws. The decision was a particularly silly example of a trend in the Court of confusing conduct and speech, and thus finding an action which is not speech worthy of first amendment protection. The lunacy of this is that almost all conduct carries a speech component. The Court picks and chooses the conduct it wishes to enshroud in constitutional protection. Walking nude in public for example can be a form of protest. Indeed, a group of Quaker women in colonial Boston engaged in a naked promenade to protest Puritan persecution of the Society of Friends. Yet, the Supreme Court has declined to strike down laws that ban public nudity. The Court thus designates itself the arbiter of what conduct should have legal protection. I prefer that such a role be granted to legislatures. Legislators can be voted out. Supreme Court justices are frequently with us for generations as they grow old handing down the law to we lesser breeds. Besides, it is easy to change the law, and hard to amend the Constitution, unless one happens to be one of our nine Platonic Guardians. The Supreme Court, in effect, swiftly amends the Constitution each year by majority vote of the Court and the rest of us are left to deal with freedoms often infringed as a result, especially our most important freedom: the right to rule ourselves.
“The Court picks and chooses the conduct it wishes to enshroud in constitutional protection.”
Which leads us to a country run by an unelected oligarchy of judges and leftist activist lawyers. If the past 9 years (actually much longer, but particularly the last 9 years) have shown us anything, it is that the left has weaponized the legal system to get what they want through lawfare, court decisions and consent judgments when they can get it at the ballot box. And when anyone pushes back, including the citizenry voting in people that want to fix it (e.g. DJT), you get riots. While we should never stoop to their level, particularly the rioting part, until the “mushy middle,” figure out this is a war and they are prepared to take action to stop it, it is only going to get worse.
The Founding Fathers have to be rolling in their graves to see a branch of government that they wanted to be the least powerful transformed into the most powerful.
Johnson could have burned his pajamas. The American Flag belongs to all Americans in joint and common tenancy. The American Flag is our property, cloth and all.
If Johnson burned my house because he did not like me, according to this court Johnson goes free.
The rest is censored.
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