No More Sacred Cows

If Burning a Pride Flag Is a Crime, Burning Old Glory Is Too

OPINION: By Walter Curt

President Trump has done what our political class has dodged for a generation: he drew a bright line around the American flag. With his new executive order directing the Department of Justice to prioritize prosecutions where flag desecration overlaps with real crimes—and with his explicit call for a one‑year jail sentence for those who burn Old Glory—he has announced that the era of ritualized contempt for the national symbol is over. Spare us the pearl‑clutching about “slippery slopes.” We’re not approaching a slope; we’ve been scraping along the bottom of the ravine for years while the same people who cheer the burning of the Stars and Stripes throw folks in prison for torching their own sacred banners.

If the First Amendment question were as “obvious” as the pundits insist, Texas v. Johnson wouldn’t have been a 5–4 cliff‑hanger in 1989—with the liberal bloc (joined, famously and regrettably, by Justice Scalia) blessing flag burning while Chief Justice Rehnquist led a fierce dissent defending the people’s right to protect their national emblem. Texas v. Johnson was wrongly decided then and looks worse now. The sequel came a year later in United States v. Eichman, another 5–4 decision swatting down Congress’s Flag Protection Act. That’s not “settled” in the moral sense—just narrowly decided in the judicial sense, with the Court’s slimmest majority elevating performative desecration over the people’s interest in preserving a unifying standard.

Meanwhile, the “it’s free speech!” absolutists have ignored the criminalizing the destruction of other political symbols. In 2019, Adolfo Martinez ripped down an LGBTQ flag from a church in Ames, Iowa, and burned it. He didn’t get a stern lecture and a civics pamphlet—he got more than fifteen years in prison, including fifteen for the hate‑crime arson, plus an extra year and thirty days on related counts. Across the country, vandalism of rainbow crosswalks has repeatedly drawn arrests, felony charges, and probationary sentences. When our elites like the symbol, it’s “community,” “safety,” and “hate crimes.” When it’s the flag that draped the coffins of our grandfathers, it’s suddenly “expression.” Funny how that works.

And if you think the principle is hard to grasp, try this: federal law already makes it a crime—punishable by up to six months in jail—to mutilate or deface U.S. currency with the intent to render it unfit for circulation. In other words, you can go to jail for burning a dollar… but burn the flag that our soldiers carried into Anzio and Iwo Jima and we’re told it’s a constitutional sacrament. Either arson is speech or arson is crime. It can’t be both depending on the logo on the fabric and the politics of the moment.

The predictable objection is that Trump’s order “criminalizes speech.” Read it. The order expressly targets conduct that already violates content‑neutral laws—disorderly conduct, arson, property destruction—and invites prosecutors to test the edges where flag burning is used to incite imminent lawless action or amounts to unprotected “fighting words.” It also directs referrals to state and local authorities where open‑burning rules or property laws apply. In plain English: if you desecrate the flag while breaking real laws, you’ll be treated like anyone else who breaks those laws. That is the opposite of a viewpoint‑based regime. It’s a long‑overdue insistence on equal enforcement, with the flag treated as the sacred national standard it is.

“But this is a slippery slope!” No. Slopes slope downward. We’ve already landed at the bottom, where burning the American flag is “brave,” but burning a rainbow flag is a hate crime; where scarring a painted crosswalk leads to charges, but publicly torching the banner of a nation is a performance art credit. The “slope” crowd doesn’t fear tyranny; they fear consistency. They’ve grown accustomed to a hierarchy of symbols in which their favored totems are protected with criminal penalties and your country’s is mocked with legal immunity. Enough.

Will this be challenged? Of course. Good. Let’s have the fight in daylight. The Constitution is not allergic to common sense, and the Court should revisit a pair of decisions that created a constitutional carve‑out for the one symbol that should be above carve‑outs. If the Court won’t budge, then Congress can do what it nearly did multiple times: send the states a flag‑protection amendment and let the people decide. In the meantime, a one‑year sentence draws a bright, moral line: desecrating the national banner isn’t edgy speech; it’s a deliberate attack on the civic fabric that holds 330 million very different people together.

Our fathers taught us to stand when the colors pass by. Our sons and daughters still come home under that cloth. Treating the flag with reverence is not idolatry; it’s gratitude. President Trump’s order begins the work of restoring that reverence and ending the regime where the ruling class declares their symbols sacred and yours kindling. If it’s illegal to burn pride flags and to scar rainbow crosswalks, and illegal to burn a dollar bill, then it shouldn’t be “performance art” to burn Old Glory. It should be a crime. Period. We’re done pretending otherwise.