You Can't Burn the Flag!
by Roger M. Firestone, 33 KCCH
rfire@jtan.com
http://mastermason.com/rfire

10159 Turnberry Place

Oakton, VA 22124-2847

By the time this is printed, there should be hardly anyone in these United States that has not heard of the Supreme Court decision of 1989 June that burning an American flag is an act of symbolic speech, protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution. How can one maintain, as I do in the title, that "You can't burn the Flag!"?

Certainly burning a U.S. flag is an act so foreign to Masons as for none of us to have contemplated it, except perhaps in the long-ago days of the 1960's counterculture when some were young and angry. It may therefore be hard to understand what inspires an act that so many of us find abhorrent. Yet Scottish Rite Masons ought to recall being urged, at a critical point in their progress to the thirty-second degree, to defy the symbols of tyranny as evidence of their commitment to the ideals of Freemasonry. The young man whose act led to the Supreme Court decision seems convinced that the American Flag is likewise a symbol of tyranny, to be defied and desecrated in public. He even believes that most Americans share his ideas, as was made clear in a television interview the day the Court's decision was handed down.

There is no question that America has failed this young man, but not in the way he thinks. To his mind, America is at fault for failure to live up to its ideals, as he sees them. But ideals are just that--standards of perfection, established as goals. The United States of America is a human institution, composed of some 250 million individuals with differing ideas of how those standards are to be interpreted. Not only do those standards differ from person to person, but they have also changed over time; concepts such as slavery or indirect representation, acceptable in the 18th Century even amongst those Founding Fathers who were Masons, have given way to freedom for all under law, and more democratic means of electing officials. The Preamble expresses the concept perfectly: The Constitution is established "in order to form a more perfect Union." Only "more perfect," not fully perfected, because the authors of that document knew that perfection in human affairs was unattainable. But they also knew that the struggle towards perfection and towards the ideals expressed in the earlier Declaration of Independence was vital to the health and growth of the Nation just being born.

We have let down the flag-burners not by falling short of our ideals, but by failing to communicate to them just what those ideals mean and what the process of national growth should be like. Years ago, a regular course in primary and secondary education was called "Civics," which taught students the structure of our government and the values of American political life. Now collected with history, economics, geography, and related subjects under the rubric of "Social Studies," the mechanical elements of civics are still taught, but our schools no longer seek to teach American beliefs. A value-free approach to education was supposed to allow pupils to develop their own philosophy of life. This might have been appropriate for students of college age or later, where the necessary intellectual resources had been developed. For younger people, it simply left them open to predation by whatever belief system they happened to encounter--radicalism, bigotry, or the savvy of the streets. Those who hoped to lure the young people of the nation to the left-wing counterculture must now deal with children growing up to become drug users, idlers, and even neo-Nazi skinheads. If these children wish to express disrespect for a national symbol and contempt for America, we must admit to have done things to earn that contempt.

One answer to the question posed at the beginning is found in the essential history of Masonry, which centers around the construction of King Solomon's Temple. That Temple was not merely a building in which certain religious rites were to take place; it was also a symbol of the triumph over paganism of the belief in the one God as Creator of the Universe, His covenant with Abraham, the faithfulness of the Patriarchs, the service of Moses, and all the other leaders of Israel. Earthly victories are transient, however. The Temple was to last little more than four centuries before the pagans, in the Babylonian conquest, were to pull it down. Rebuilt during Persian rule, it was to be desecrated by the Seleucid Greeks under Antiochus. The Maccabees reconsecrated the Temple three years later, only to have the Roman Empire subjugate the land and destroy the Temple for the second time in the year 70. One wall, known as the Western or "Wailing" Wall, remains as evidence of the grand edifice, while a Muslim house of worship, the Dome of the Rock, stands on the site today.

Ninteen centuries after the Roman destruction, therefore, little remains of the Temple of King Solomon, does it? Nothing could be further from the truth! It is only the physical Temple that has been destroyed, and that was always vulnerable to the elements. Even if repaired sedulously, someday even "the heavens shall be no more" and the Sun will, in its dying agonies engulf and destroy the Earth. But the Temple was much more than an edifice of stone, and its symbolic essence will endure so long as there are somewhere in the Universe Freemasons to revere it. The real Temple is a "house not made with hands" and exists forever in the hearts of Masons.

If the Flag of the United States means so little to you or is such a symbol of tyranny that you can contemplate burning or otherwise desecrating it, then it is hardly the Flag at all that you are burning. All you have there is a collection of strips of cloth in various colors, sewed together in a particular arrangement. It means nothing to you. Go ahead and set it on fire. You are expressing rage and contempt toward the majority of Americans and our values, but we knew you weren't part of our community anyway. You won't be satisfied until you can impose your point of view on all Americans, and that intolerance is what sets you apart from that which makes America worth defending. Your act tells us nothing new, and the Supreme Court rightly decided that there is no point in banning an act of pointless fury and petulance.

My Flag is something else. It is a symbol of an America "conceived in liberty," an America that hopes to grow and improve daily, an America that can encompass all points of view, even the hateful, an America that has the strength and confidence to withstand and benefit from criticism. My Flag stands for a collection of principles refined for over two hundred years, tested in battle and in the press, changing and advancing to meet new challenges as they occur. Some jingoistic super-patriots will desecrate the Flag by wearing it on their sleeves, wrapping themselves and their intolerances in it. My Flag is, like Solomon's Temple, carried in the heart, where it is forever safe from these abuses. You can raze every flag-making factory, shred to rags every banner spangled with stars, set fire to every bolt of cloth in the colors of red, white, and blue. But an American Flag carried in the heart of those who believe in America's ideals is beyond destruction. "You can't burn the Flag!"

This article appeared in the September 1989 Scottish Rite Journal, published by the Supreme Council, 33, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, Washington, DC.

The Freedoms Foundation of Valley Forge, PA, recognized this article with the George Washington Honor Medal for Excellence in Public Communications.