Stan Tiner, editor of the Mobile (Ala.) Register and 1997-98 chairman of the ASNE Freedom of Information Committee, testified against the flag desecration amendment before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on March 25. This article apeared in the Register March 29.

By Stan Tiner

"Send 'em a message!"

That was George Wallace's beloved refrain. When he shouted it menacingly during his run for the presidency, great hurrahs were heard across the land. Those words bestirred deep, dark passions in many Americans during the '60s.

By casting a vote for George Corley Wallace, a citizen could send a message to all the demons for social change: the pinkos and peaceniks, the hippies, the liberal judges, and perhaps not least, the angry blacks who had taken to the streets in pursuit of their "civil rights."

And the message he wanted to send was simple: The great white middle-class majority was sick and tired of the dissent. It was time for the agitators to sit down and shut up. It was time to return to the sweet slumber of the status quo.

Appearing last week before a Senate subcommittee considering an amendment that would ban flag desecration, Sen. Orrin Hatch was full of anger, the same sort of righteous anger that used to inflame Gov. Wallace.

"It is time to draw the line!" he told the committee, describing the anti-flag-burning bill he has sponsored. There was no mistaking his outrage, and the American Legionnaires packed into the small committee hearing room murmured their approval.

"It is time to draw the line!"

The Legionnaires — in Washington last week for a convention — were mesmerized by Hatch as he blistered the fuzzy thinkers, the weak-kneed liberals, the constitutional apologists, the civil libertarians, all of those who would oppose his amendment.

But what Hatch wants us to do is lunacy: tamper with our Bill of Rights for the first time in history.

Using the devotion that Americans feel for the flag as the engine of his rhetoric, Hatch argued that flag desecration is not related to free speech. Such behavior constitutes a bad deed or an evil act unrelated to speech. Opponents of the amendment see the flag as no more than a piece of cloth, he explained, dismissing them as being unpatriotic, perhaps worse.

The senator's speech was the most revealing of all the testimony given Wednesday on the flag desecration amendment. By "drawing a line," the senator and other like-minded persons would indeed be sending a message: Don't mess with the flag; don't mess with our version of America.

The anger that flag desecration ignites in Americans underscores the symbolic statement that committing such an act makes. We understood that statement when we saw demonstrators in Tiananmen Square burn the flag of China. We all applauded, and then condemned the Chinese government when it stormed the square and extinguished the student rebellion.

Freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution with its Bill of Rights set us apart from totalitarian regimes. It is not surprising that Adolph Hitler banned the burning of Nazi flags shortly after he came to power, or that the Chinese banned flag burning as soon as they took over Hong Kong. That's what despots do.

But in America we have prospered because freedom has allowed the greatest possible measure of discussion and debate. We are no less a nation because someone burns a flag, but we would be much less a nation were we to ban even this repugnant measure of speech.

Jim Warner, a Marine pilot who endured five and a half years in North Vietnamese prisons, said it best in a statement entered into the congressional record: "The fact is, our anger is aroused by the act of the burning of the flag. It could not be more clear: an act which is filled with meaning is expression. No government ever constituted upon this earth has had the moral authority to punish for the content of expression. If our enemies act without moral restraint, that does not justify us in emulating them."

Sen. Hatch's "time to draw the line" speech last week suggests an agenda that may go well beyond the flag amendment. If we take this unprecedented step of amending the Bill of Rights in order to protect the flag, what other restrictions will follow?

What other "lines" need we draw?

Will we need to give similar protection to the Constitution, or the Holy Bible, or a political tract written by Sen. Orrin Hatch? And who will define what constitutes flag desecration? Can designers continue to use it on swimsuits? Could you upholster a chair with the flag? Could used-car salesmen drape themselves in it? Could filmmakers documenting the '60s be sent to prison for re-creating a flag burning?

Just now, I believe, it is the Bill of Rights, especially the people's right to free speech, that is in danger. It is there that we must draw the line.