Over the past few weeks we as citizens of the United States have seen what it is like to experience pain and confusion with the bombings in Boston and the fire at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas. Being a 21 year old college student at Iowa State University, I have experienced these and many other painful experiences including one of the worst in the attacks on 9/11. I also have family members who were alive during WWII and the Korean, Vietnam and Cold Wars. During these times it seemed like hope was depleted or lost, but after each one of them the United States as a country has persevered because of the principals it was founded upon in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that are symbolized with the star spangled banner.

In a little more than a month it will be fourteen years since it was made a legal right to burn the flag of the United States based on the first amendment and specifically because it is labeled freedom of speech. Since then, there have been six resolutions passed by the House to have a flag-desecration amendment added to the Constitution to help protect the flag from people hurting or defacing it, but only three times has the Senate voted and each time it failed by a close margin. In my opinion, this issue needs to be brought up in Congress again because not only do we need to protect the enduring symbol of America and the principals, values and beliefs we are founded upon, but we need to realize that burning the flag should not be constituted as free speech.

The Declaration of Independence, Emancipation Proclamation and the Constitution and its amendments add to our nation’s history, but it is the flag which represents all of these and its citizens alike. It is not the state flag of Iowa (which most likely many Iowans don’t know what it looks like) which we pledge allegiance to; it is the flag of the United States that we pledge our loyalty to. It is this flag that covers the caskets of our fallen soldiers and this flag that is raised when we win a gold medal in the Olympics. It is the symbol that our national anthem embodies because we want to be loyal to the “land of the free, and the home of the brave.” The flag symbolizes everything we are in America and if it is burned that “is the equivalent of an inarticulate grunt or roar that, it seems fair to say, is most likely to be indulged in not to express any particular idea, but to antagonize others” as Chief Justice Rehnquist said in his diss ent on the Texas v. Johnson case. That is no way to treat the flag which stands for the principals of our country.

The argument of “symbolic speech” which falls under the first amendment is now what this type of desecration is labeled as. However, this is a new idea that has been fought in the courts only since the 1960’s. Before these cases, people understood the idea that speech occurred when someone verbally spoke an opinion in protest of the United States. The first amendment lists rights including freedom of religion, the press, the right to assemble and speech. It does not say symbolic speech or expressing an idea using words and actions, but speech. The Constitution says that we have the right to free speech, but burning a flag in protest has nothing to do with speaking, instead it is expressing an opinion in protest and therefore should not be classified as free speech.

Every time I see an American flag burned in protest, it feels like the history of America, and those people who have helped make these memories, is being stepped on and disrespected. It is time that we as a nation, if we truly believe in the values associated with the flag which we want to protect, step up and use our right to free speech by telling our Congressman that the flag is important and that this amendment needs to be passed.