Matt Cavedon in The Dispatch: “The flag deserves our reverence. So does the freedom to disrespect it.”
Society for the Rule of Law Member Matt Cavedon, of the CATO Institute, was in The Dispatch championing the free speech values behind flag burning.
Cavedon argues that guarding the hard-fought liberties which the American flag represents supersedes the moral outrage we feel against the burning of the flag itself. He acknowledges the justified revulsion we feel at someone profaning a flag for which so many have sacrificed. Desecrating the flag “bearing the same colors and patterns of the one that sailors in dress whites folded across my grandfather’s casket” would “hurt my heart,” but “the freedom that the flag in particular represents is even more important to me than its stitches and thread.” He compares the sacred primacy of free speech in American democracy to other ideologies that persecute dissent. He recalls the terrorist massacre of satirists at Charlie Hebdo, the arrest of a social media commentator for posting a photo of the Thai king’s dog, and the British arrest of a politically incorrect comedian for “incitement.” Societies that prevent free expression disrupt the democratic process and, in many instances, obstruct necessary social and cultural change. In the United States, free speech depends on adjudicating Americans’ “harsh and brutal differences” through open discourse and on Election Day.
By abstaining from legal prosecution for offensive speech, the government enables that discourse to occur. “Once the government gets into the business of deciding what speech is sufficiently patriotic to be allowed and what is not, the law is no longer the roof under which all of us can safely take shelter from each other’s sense of outrage, nor the highway along which hard ideas can speed as they try to change minds.” Banning speech that insults the flag opens the door to further persecution against criticism of other symbols that we find sacred. This threatens one of the core values that give our flag meaning in the first place. “The Flag Deserves Better than Protection.”
Read the article here.