Alliance pushes flag amendment

The Citizens Flag Alliance came to Utah Wednesday to convince the news media that Utahns favor a flag amendment — and to convince Sen. Bob Bennett that his alternative flag statute is the wrong way to go.

"We want his vote very badly," said Maj. General Patrick H. Brady, Citizens Flag Alliance board chairman. "He can decide this issue." The alliance hopes that Bennett will support the Flag Protection Amendment once he realizes that most Utahns favor both the amendment's immediate and long-range intent.

Utah is also on the alliance's radar because of "extraordinarily negative" editorials and letters to the editor in Utah newspapers against the amendment, Brady said.

That amendment allows Congress and the states to enact laws to protect the American flag. The amendment itself does not criminalize flag burning or change the Constitution, although both the media and public are under the misperception that it does, he said.

At a press conference at the Capitol, the alliance unveiled results of a statewide independent poll, conducted by Opinion Research in July. The poll shows that 65 percent of Utahns incorrectly believe that the amendment itself would protect the flag from desecration. It also shows that 7 percent have never heard of the amendment.

The poll, a random-digit-dial sample containing listed and unlisted numbers, also showed that 69 percent of Utahns strongly or somewhat favor a flag amendment; and that 68 percent believe that desecrating the U.S. flag is "not an appropriate expression of freedom of speech as guaranteed by the First Amendment."

The U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision in 1989 held that flag desecration is a form of speech and therefore protected by the First Amendment. Federal and state laws protecting the flag have since been ruled unconstitutional, including statutes such as the one introduced by Bennett, said Richard Parker, a law professor at Harvard University, or, as Brady called it when introducing Parker, "that bastion of liberalism."

Parker criticized Bennett's statute as too narrow and "an empty gesture" that would not apply to any of the incidents of physical desecration of the flag in the past decade. It will likely not pass the Senate, and even if it did it would be struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court as "an unconstitutional infirmity," he said.

That's why the amendment must be passed first, so that statutes protecting the flag can later be passed, he said. Bennett's statute serves as "a red herring" that blocks an amendment "supported by a majority of Americans and by Congress," Parker said.

"Is that courageous or, to be blunt, subversive?" Parker asked his audience, made up of several journalists and several rows of veterans in uniform.