On Wednesday the Senate failed to pass a flag desecration amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The vote was 63-37 (Grassley yea, Harkin nay), which is four votes shy of the 2/3 majority required for Constitutional amendments. The House of Representatives passed the amendment with a 2/3 majority last year.

My problem with the flag desecration amendment is not that it failed to pass, but that it was within four votes of passing. Holy cow! What are they thinking?

The flag desecration amendment is so wrong that I don’t even know where to start.

First of all, media coverage of the amendment has been terrible. I watch Headline News nearly every day, and I even watch more C-SPAN than I care to admit, but I did not know that the Senate was voting on the issue. I didn’t even know that the House had already passed the amendment.

Even after the fact, it was more of a side note than a full story. I don’t know about you, but I tend to think that Constitutional amendments are important and worthy of news coverage.

Secondly, the reason they need a Constitutional amendment is because the Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that flag desecration is protected by the First Amendment. That means Congress is powerless to pass any laws prohibiting flag desecration because after the first person got charged it would take any federal judge two minutes to throw it out.

The only way Congress can make flag burning illegal is to amend the Bill of Rights, which has been protecting the freedoms of Americans for over 200 years.

The Bill of Rights is the defining element of what it means to be American. At the time it was a completely revolutionary piece of legislation. It has served as a model for other nations pursuing democracy over its entire lifetime.

Elected officials all swear to uphold the Constitution. I find it appalling that 63 percent of our senators are willing to alter one of the greatest pieces of legislation in history with such caprice.

Here are some instructions for the Christian right, who the primarily Republican backers of the flag desecration amendment like to associate themselves with. After a hard day’s work of condemning homosexuals and Jews, pull out your Bible and kick back in an easy chair.

It turns out the Bible is actually a book, one of those pesky things they had back in school and made you read all the time. That means if you open it (go ahead, don’t be scared) you will find pages and pages of writing. And you know what? More than the first half of it was written by Jewish people.

If you look up Exodus chapter 34, you can read all about how God told Moses about the Ten Commandments. If you look at verse 17, God says, “You shall not make for yourselves molten gods.” That means idolatry is bad. That means you shouldn’t deify inanimate objects, like the U.S. flag.

Another interesting thing about the flag desecration amendment is that this is the fourth time it has failed to pass since 1989.

I haven’t noticed any public outrage about it failing to pass either. Maybe that means that the majority of Americans don’t need or want it to pass. Somebody should tell the amendment’s chief sponsor Orrin Hatch (R-UT).

Hatch said “Sooner of later we’ll get enough people here to get this amendment passed.”

The saddest thing about the amendment is that this time around it is all about political gain. The last time the GOP won a presidential race was in 1988. George Bush went from town to town talking about William Horton, “read my lips, no new taxes” and how crazy radicals want to burn the flag. Racism, a lie and un-American crap, but it worked.

The Senate vote coincided with a D.C. meeting of the American Legion, 2000 of which had a rally at the capitol for passing the amendment. Pretty cheap, huh?

“Burning the flag is not speech, it’s conduct of the most offensive kind,” said Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss). “Protecting the right to destroy property has no relation to the question whether people are free to speak or to write or campaign or petition against the leaders of their government.”

This statement reveals several differences between Sen. Lott and myself. I consider murder to be conduct of the most offensive kind. Flag burning has nothing to do with protecting the right to destroy property.

For one, I think most people who burn flags bring their own, and if they stole one of Mr. Lott’s, I’m sure they would get charged with theft.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pro-flag burning.

I have never burned a flag, and I think the idea is kind of stupid and very clich‚ at this point in time. However, making stupid laws is one thing but stupid amendments to the Bill of Rights is another beast altogether.

To close, Lott defended his waste of time on this issue with the following: “I believe this issue is more important than any appropriation, or any new set of regulations, for it goes to the heart of who we are as a people and what we are as a nation.”

Well I’m glad the Senate Majority Leader has his priorities straight.

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Erik Hoversten is a senior in math from Eagan, Minn.