OPINION | NWA EDITORIAL: Flags and freedoms

U.S. Rep. Steve Womack of Rogers and some of his colleagues are back, again, attempting to push a Flag Desecration Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In essence, they believe the path to celebrate our nation's freedom is best served by taking away this particular aspect of it.

GOP Sen. Steve Daines of Montana introduced the measure in the Senate, as he has twice before.

Certainly, there's no downside for Womack, as it's hard to gin up much sympathy for someone bold enough to burn or destroy a symbol representing the very freedoms they enjoy. It's a blessing that flag desecration is not something any of us sees every day.

If anyone ever asked us, we'd urge the individual not to burn the nation's flag in protest. Indeed, we'd have to resist a temptation to punch him in the nose, and we hope we could do so. It's not at all that we agree people should desecrate the flag. Far from it.

But sometimes freedom challenges, and we can think of few things so challenging as to see someone making a political point by burning the Stars and Stripes. From our perspective, though, anyone willing to desecrate it doesn't fully comprehend its worth in symbolizing this nation's ideals.

Now, if the person attempted to burn a flag that belonged to someone else, he ought to be brought up on charges for damaging someone else's property.

If it's his flag, though ...

We would be disgusted by the act, but there's also something significant about a nation so enamored with and devoted to freedom that it resists charging people with crimes because they sought to symbolically stab so directly at the heart of the United States.

The men and women of our military do not fight for piece of cloth, but what that flag represents. So when some numbskull decides he's going to destroy a U.S. flag as some form of political statement, he fails before he even starts, because he cannot destroy what the flag represents as long as there are others who hold it dear.

The reason the U.S. Supreme Court in 1989 ruled a Texas protester's burning of a flag was a form of free speech is because it's exceptionally difficult to simultaneously praise the liberty and freedoms the flag represents while also denouncing how someone carries out those ideas.

Let freedom be. And fly that flag.