Even though he personally condemned flag burning, the late Justice Antonin Scalia joined the majority in both cases and actively defended both decisions. At a public forum sponsored by Brooklyn Law School in 2015, I asked him how he would re-write the flag burning laws, if he could do so. He jumped at the opportunity to say that if he were the king, flag burners would go to jail. Yet, he hastened to remind his audience that he was not the king, that in America we don’t have a king, that there is no political orthodoxy here, and that the Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, leaves freedom of expression to individual choices, not government mandates.
The American flag is revered because it is a universally recognizable symbol of the human sacrifice of some for the human freedom of many. Justice Scalia recognized that flag burning is deeply offensive to many people — this writer among them — yet he, like Justice Jackson before him, knew that banning it dilutes the very freedoms that make the flag worth revering.
-Andrew P. Napolitano
Read on:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/12/andrew-p-napolitano/may-burn-american-flag/
