Photo: moonstarsilverwolf Jeffrey Toobin‘s recent New Yorker profile of John Paul Stevens, the retiring leading-liberal Supreme Court Justice, is interesting throughout, and contains this nugget:
Stevens’s Second World War experience also played a part in perhaps his most anomalous opinion as a Justice. In 1989, he dissented from the decision that protected the right to burn the American flag as a form of protest. “The ideas of liberty and equality have been an irresistible force in motivating leaders like Patrick Henry, Susan B. Anthony, and Abraham Lincoln, schoolteachers like Nathan Hale and Booker T. Washington, the Philippine Scouts who fought at Bataan, and the soldiers who scaled the bluff at Omaha Beach,” he wrote in an unusually lyrical dissent. “If those ideas are worth fighting for-and our history demonstrates that they are-it cannot be true that the flag that uniquely symbolizes their power is not itself worthy of protection.”
“The funny thing about that case is, the only consequence of it-nobody burns flags anymore,” Stevens told me. “It was an important symbolic form of protest at the time. But nobody does it anymore. As long as it’s legal, it’s not a big deal. You just don’t have flag burning.”
Question: is the lack of flag burning truly, as Stevens puts it, a “consequence” of the law? I often wonder where all the civic unrest and rioting in U.S. cities has gone, especially with the increase in income inequality. Should we be looking to Supreme Court explanations for that as well? Or are there perhaps much, much broader and more numerous forces at work?
and 
. You can also watch it on 
I think you misinterpreted the quote. Stevens was saying that the fact flag burning is now legal has stopped flag burning.
I always thought if someone really was troubled by seeing the flag burned, the last thing you’d want to do is ban the practice. People would burn the flag specifically for the drama of getting arrested.
I recently did a little research on this, and in fact, I have found several cases of people being arrested for violating currently unconstitutional anti-flag desecration laws or their states. In all but one instance, the accused were released only after naive officials realized that, nope, it isn’t illegal to desecrate a flag. the other was pending a judicial review.
On the other hand, Johnson was an aberration even when flag-burning was illegal. It never happened much. But it’s always an issue for Republicans in an election year (look it up).
Where have protests gone? Remember the millions in the streets protesting the Iraq war? I was there, and there were, it seemed, at least a hundred thousand in San Francisco. But you can only affect policy through protests if you get media attention — and the media are no longer neutral. They have been told, apparently, not to cover protests, or to downgrade them. So a hundred thousand get reported as 3,00. Then what’s the point?
Flag burning must be very labor intensive, cause we seem to have off-shored it to other countries.
Brett #2 is dead-on. If you burn a flag these days you’ll be demonized without your message being considered. It’s a worse-than-useless tactic. How can we get some statistics on how many flag burners are actually in support of whatever they pretend to oppose?
I would rather see the flag burned as a form of political expression than to allow it to be co-opted by the right wing lunatic fringe who lay claim to all things patriotic and therefore strip away the importance and meaning of those symbols.
Pretty much my thoughts on the subject:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF2iX2VG6e4
Where’s all the civil unrest? Come now, just a few weeks ago Times editorials were screeching that the Tea Party protests were a Threat To The Very Fabric Of Our Society.