Around the World in Things You Can’t Do to Flags

A symbol used to represent something powerful or influential—a person, a sports team, a religion—also makes itself vulnerable to destruction. It isn’t easy to, say, destroy a country, but you can destroy a symbol of that country fairly easily, and there’s no symbol more identified with a nation, and thus more commonly destroyed in protest, than a national flag. In the United States, the Supreme Court has been clear and consistent in the opinion that the desecration of the Stars and Stripes is an American right, enshrined in the First…

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