Lastings Milledge may not stick around real long this time around, but the Mets have a serious stud outfielder ready to take over left next year. Or, perhaps the team needs to consider moving Xavier Nady to left and letting Milledge and his cannon arm handle right. Watch what maybe the best outfield throw in years here.
The flag amendment: Reverence confronts reason
Here is the latest weekly “Inside the First Amendment” column from the First Amendment Center in Arlington, VA.. It is provided free to newspapers around the country.
The flag amendment: Reverence confronts reason
By Paul K. McMasters
First Amendment CenterThe unadulterated version of one of history’s most remarkable covenants between a government and its people – the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution – hangs by a slender thread in the U.S. Senate.
A proposal to amend the Constitution to prevent flag desecration is scheduled for a vote in the Senate during the week of June 26. Supporters and foes agree the measure is within a single vote of the 67 needed for passage. It already has passed in the House. If it passes in the Senate, it goes directly to the state legislatures, where
ratification is virtually assured since all 50 legislatures have endorsed the concept and only 38 are needed to permanently change the Constitution.So, a lot rides on this impending vote in the Senate.
If the one-vote margin falls on the side of passage, the Senate will set in motion a dramatic and lasting change in the way we view and treat political dissent. If the flag-desecration amendment is ratified, for the first time in this nation’s history we will have materially changed the Bill of Rights, which affirms and secures the fundamental rights of all Americans against the power and reach of government.
More specifically, speech protected by the First Amendment and affirmed by half a dozen Supreme Court decisions since 1907 stands to be criminalized.
Why are our political leaders contemplating such a radical action?
There has been no outbreak of flag-burnings or other acts of disrespect. There is no evidence that Americans revere our flag less these days; quite the contrary.
But a single act of disrespect to the symbol of our nationhood and national unity – even the prospect of such an act – is an unconscionable affront to millions of Americans. Many of them are weary of waiting for the Supreme Court to “get it right.” They are ready and willing to rewrite the Constitution to protect the flag.
Such reverence for the flag notwithstanding, there are powerful and persuasive reasons advanced by the opponents of such an amendment that the courts indeed have got it right.
The courts have consistently ruled that flag-burning is protected by the First Amendment because it is symbolic speech, one of the most powerful forms of expression – a “short cut from mind to mind,” as judges and justices have described it.
A flag-desecration amendment, therefore, would pierce the heart of political speech, “expression situated at the core of our First Amendment values,” wrote Justice Brennan in the 1989 decision Texas v. Johnson.
Further, ratification of a flag-desecration amendment would launch a decades-long constitutional and legal battle over the nature of new laws implementing the amendment, the definitions of “flag” and “desecration,” and the courts’ interpretation of those laws and those definitions. Americans wishing to use the flag in commerce, in art, in political campaigns or in dissent would not know whether they were vulnerable to prosecution.
There is no question that the U.S. flag is the most endearing and enduring of our symbols. It leads our soldiers into battle. It flies proudly above our monuments and government buildings. It stirs our patriotic passions and reminds us who we are and what we can be.
It is the Constitution, however, that brings order to the democratic process, that guides us through legal and cultural turmoil, that keeps our leaders in line and our institutions accountable, and that requires us to reason together and to tolerate differing, even offensive, views.
And it is the Bill of Rights generally, and the First Amendment in particular, that guarantees some of our most cherished freedoms.
To change those charters to protect the flag is to contradict what the flag stands for. To protect a symbol from physical desecration, we would desecrate the constitutional covenant securing real freedoms.
When we salute the flag, we salute our commitment to free speech and the right to protest.
As we regard our flag, each of us experiences a range of emotions conveying a range of messages, different for each of us. Those differences become even more significant if we anoint by amendment the majority or those in charge with the authority to foster an orthodox view of our national symbol and criminalize any opinion or feeling to the contrary.
That is why it is so important to keep the First Amendment intact. It stands as a caution and a barrier to the idea that the majority can dictate what people may say and how they may say it. When it comes to the regulation of expression, a majority risks becoming a mob.
Changing the First Amendment to protect the flag confesses a needless uncertainty about the power and permanence of both. To raise a symbol above the reality it stands for would be unwise, unnecessary and ultimately un-American.
Paul K. McMasters is First Amendment ombudsman at the First Amendment Center, 1101 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, Va. 22209. Web: firstamendmentcenter.org. E-mail: pmcmasters@fac.org.
Was there a coverup of Haditha?
The military is investigating the allegations that U.S. Marines engaged in what essentially was a massacre of Iraqi civilians in November, with at least one report expected later this week, according to The Washington Post.
The report, according to the story, is expected to be critical of the way in whcih the incident was reported up the chain of command and that the Marines allowed false statements to be released to the public.
Additional investigations are either ongoing or expected, but it does appear now that the Haditha massacre is fact — another blow to our credibility in Iraq and across the Arab world.
War and disease in Darfur
The story in Darfur just keeps getting worse. While there has been a peace pact signed — one that may or may not stop the killing — the Darfur region is now facing a major health crisis.
From The New York Times:
The brutal war in Darfur has set off what the United Nations has called the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” a crucible of death that seems to grow grimmer despite a new peace agreement. But it is not bullets that kill most people here now. It is pneumonia borne on desert dust, diarrhea caused by dirty water, malaria carried by mosquitoes to straw huts with no nets.
At least 200,000 and perhaps as many as 450,000 have died as a direct result of the conflict in Darfur, according to estimates by international health and human rights organizations, though no one is sure how many of the deaths have come from combat and how many from the hunger and disease that have been caused or worsened by the war.
But these days, people mostly die because they cannot get health care, clean water or enough food.
Local and international aid organizations here are trying to stave off these deaths, but their ranks are shrinking. They take care of 2.5 million people driven from their homes and farms with a diminishing pool of money as donors, particularly in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, have not sent all the money they pledged to Darfur. Beyond that, they work under tight restrictions imposed by Sudanese officials and face attacks by combatants who hijack their vehicles and menace their workers.
The conditions are so dire that the effort faces a widespread collapse, Jan Egeland, the top United Nations aid official, told the Security Council this month.
This is harsh stuff and should be unacceptible. That we allow it, by our own inaction, even as we make grand claims for our actions in Iraq, cheapens our credibility even farther.
I am by no means advocating a unilateral military solution. The U.S. armed forces are stretched way too thin to take on a job like this — even if we were to pull our tropps from Iraq now. An international force operating under the mandate of the United Nations — provided the U.N. and its member nations are willing to call the Darfur genocide what it is — would be a better option, though I am not convinced, especially under a current atmosphere that uses the language of democracy and international law to mask what for most nations is really nothing more than national self-interest.
So what to do? First, I think we need to get aboard the divestment movement, which as The Nation points out, is starting to be felt in Sudan:
The Sudanese government is starting to feel the pressure from the divestment movement. It took out an estimated $1 million in ads in the New York Times in
March, and the Sudanese embassy recently published a press release decrying
divestment efforts. “The fact that the regime is responding so distinctly to the
movement means they certainly understand the implications,” says (Sudan expert Eric) Reeves.
And we can empower the International Criminal Court, which currently has little authority, though its impact is likely not to be felt for a long time. (It is truly criminal that the United States, which professes to act with the highest of motives, refuses participation.)
All of this seems so inadequate. But until there is an international consensus on the Darfur genocide — a consensus that can only be created by public attention and approbrium — I fear the situation will continue to fester, if not grow worse.
Channel Surfing, The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
Thoughts on Memorial Day, a day late
I didn’t get around to this yesterday, but James Carroll reminds us of the reality of Memorial Day in this necessary corrective to the hero worship that generally carries the day.
Channel Surfing, The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
Hank Kalet 