Should it be a crime to burn the American flag? | The Tylt

Though burning the flag has been ruled constitutionally protected free speech, that hasn't stopped legislators from introducing bills to make flag burning illegal—including Hillary Clinton back in 2005.

For many who defend the right to burn the flag, it's about protecting First Amendment rights. Burning the flag may be offensive to many, but protecting free speech means we defend people's rights to say or do offensive, upsetting or distasteful things.

The Supreme Court has already ruled on this issue several times. Flag burning is protected free speech. Unless legislators can sponsor a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning, this continued debate over settled law starts to look like pointless patriotic showboating. CNN provides receipts below:

...after an appeal from Gregory Johnson, who had been convicted by a Texas court of violating a state law that prohibited the "desecration of a venerated object" such as the US flag....the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that flag burning was a form of "symbolic speech" protected by the First Amendment in 1989. The following year, in "United States v. Eichman," the court again affirmed the right to burn the flag when it ruled 5-4 that the Flag Protection Act of 1989—passed by Congress in response to the Johnson decision—was unconstitutional.

Others say the Constitution is actually not crystal clear on whether or not flag burning is protected free speech.