Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, September 5, 1993                   TAG: 9401120003
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: F2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

A FREE COUNTRY

As political symbols, however, flags remain remarkably potent, whether the flag in question is the Stars and Stripes - or the Confederate battle flag. Because of the symbolism of flags, their display or destruction constitutes a type of political speech that triggers powerful emotions.

The courts have ruled, wisely, that protesters who burn the U.S. flag are protected by the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech. Most Americans, with good cause, find such flag-burning deeply offensive. But if the Bill of Rights guaranteed the freedom only to make inoffensive political statements, the guarantee would be hollow.

Similarly, Americans who wish to display the Confederate battle flag have the right to do so, and rightly so, regardless of the fact that such display offends some other citizens.

Among those offended are many descendants of Americans who were trapped in an evil institution, black slavery, the expansion of which was one of the Confederacy's founding purposes.

They, like Americans who recoil at protest burnings of Old Glory, are affronted, and understandably so.

The precise content of nonverbal flagspeech is often less clear than the fact that it is a form of political speech. Certainly, Confederate banners aren't necessarily or always flown as a racist taunt, nor does pride in Southern heritage make one a racist. Still, the symbolism is there. Use of the Confederate flag was a growth industry, for instance, in the 1950s and '60s, during resistance to desegregation.

Again, however, this is beside the point. The First Amendment isn't worth much if all it protects is the freedom to speak in ways that nobody minds. If a citizen wants to hang a Confederate banner from his window, or carry one in his teeth for that matter, that's entirely his right. It's a free country.

Such points may seem obvious to the point of triviality, but they tend to get lost in flag flaps. You don't have to endorse the views of displayers of the Confederate flag, or burners of the U.S. flag, to support their rights to display and burn.

Neither do you have to favor flying of Confederate flags on statehouses in the South, or U.S. Senate extension of a patent for the logo of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Those are acts of government, forms of official sanctioning - not citizens' speech protected under the First Amendment. The UDC, a private organization, has a First Amendment right to incorporate the Confederate flag in its logo; it doesn't have a right to a U.S. Senate imprimatur.

Flagspeech can be deeply offensive. But the republic can survive it far more readily than it could survive an erosion of Americans' free-speech rights.