The flag is a symbol, a signifier. It doesn’t need protection. The cherished notions that the flag signifies – freedom, justice and equality – need protection. To pledge allegiance to the flag, to treat it as if it were a religious symbol is to misunderstand what it stands for. I don’t like the Pledge of Allegiance, but I won’t restrict its recitation. I don’t plan on burning a flag, but I will respect, until my last breath, the right to burn it in protest. I don’t like abortion, but, I don’t have a womb, and I will not decide the circumstances under which it is vacated.

To burn the signifier is to affirm what it signifies. There were times that I might have burned the flag in protest -- when Katherine Harris fucked Florida and the courts fucked us; when Bush threatened, “You’re either with US or with the terrorists,” forbidding other possibilities; when I found out that SBC was forwarding my phone calls, email and web searches to the NSA.

Hillary Clinton supports anti-flag burning legislation because she is a coward or ignorant; since she went to Yale Law, I’ll assume the former. She is unlike Barbara Lee or Feingold or Byrd, or Wellstone, Kucinich, Howard Dean, Bill Maher or even the Dixie Chicks, all of whom recognize the difference between signifier and signified, all who stood on unpopular ground and withstood the rancor of those ignorant and unwilling to let freedom ring. These are the people who share my convictions.

The American soldier recognizes that he risks his life for American ideals, not for the flag itself. The flag serves to remind him of his covenant with freedom, of his love for America. Americans who risked their lives abroad for rights they were denied at home did so because they believed that their progeny might receive the full blessings of liberty, the promise of America.