Word: flagging
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Admittedly, despite the significance placed on a flag-desecration amendment by incorrigible liberals like myself, only three incidents of flag-burning in 1994 and none in 1993 make the issue seem sufficiently remote and theoretical not to deserve the kind of attention garnered by the fragile peace in Bosnia or even the federal budget debate...
Still, the recent discussion of the flag-desecration amendment has brought to the fore two very different conceptions of America that are reverberating through the halls of Congress and over the presidential campaign trail. In sound bites and news conferences, the debate has adopted a superficial guise...
Liberals have argued that the First Amendment is too important to be revised because of something as rare as flag-burning. Conservatives have responded that the burning of the flag does not deserve standing as "speech" and that the American people should have the right to make laws against it if they so desire. But there is an undercurrent to this debate, one that legislators have rarely vocalized in their passing jabs and floor speeches...
Members of the conservative camp, which is inhabited by the overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans and all the Republican presidential candidates (Steve Forbes has no official position), believe that there is something fundamentally sacred about the flag. They believe it should be placed above the denigration that other symbols are subject to in our country...
...camp, populated largely by Democrats, believes that there is no symbol of our national unity and sovereignty so important that it should be deemed sacred. In fact, the notion of a sacred national symbol conflicts, they say, with part of what makes America special in the first place. A flag-burning amendment devalues both the symbol and what is symbolized: part of what makes the flag worthy of respect is the fact that we have the right to burn...