What did the Supreme Court say about flag burning in Texas v. Johnson?
Narrator says more than 3/4 of states have 'ratified' the proposed flag burning amendment; it never passed Congress, so states only passed resolutions supporting it. Interventions avoid testing this claim.
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This video explains Texas v. Johnson, where the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment protects burning the U.S. flag as political protest. The Court relied on viewpoint neutrality: government may never punish speech just because people dislike or loathe its message. The speaker shows how hated flag burning is by describing the near-success of a proposed constitutional amendment to allow punishing it.
You'll be able to
- explain what the Supreme Court decided in Texas v. Johnson.
- define viewpoint neutrality and apply it to offensive speech.
- explain why the reaction to the decision shows how speech-protective it was.
Key words
- viewpoint neutrality
- The principle that government may not punish speech just because it disagrees with or dislikes the idea being expressed.
- flag desecration
- Damaging or burning a flag, often as a form of protest.
- constitutional amendment
- A formal change to the Constitution, which needs two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the states.
- ratify
- To formally approve something, such as a state approving a proposed amendment.
Transcript
It is not for the government to prefer some ideas or to suppress some ideas. Texas v. Johnson was such an important case to underscore those principles because at the time, and indeed to this day, public opinion surveys show that there is just about no expression that is more widely loads and more deeply hated among the American public than burning the U.S. flag or so called desecrating the U.S. flag.
Now, again, to put this in context for people who might see it as fairly trivial, we have to understand that the day after the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment does protect the right to burn the flag in political protests despite the fact that it is deeply offensive to presumably, the vast majority of the public, that is the offensiveness of the expression, the court said is a reason to protect it.
Not a reason to suppress it that because of this viewpoint neutrality principle, government may never punish speech solely because of disagreement with dislike of even loathing of the idea, the message, the viewpoint. The day after that decision came out. The then president of the United States went and gave a speech denouncing it and Congress immediately introduced a proposed amendment to the First Amendment to make an exception for burning the American flag, and that amendment came perillusly close to being enacted. It requires 3/4 of the states to ratify a proposed constitutional amendment. More than 3/4 of the states have ratified the proposed flag burning amendment to the First Amendment. It requires a two thirds majority vote in both the House and the Senate. More than two thirds of the House voted in favor of that amendment, and the last time it came up on the floor of the Senate,
it was literally one vote shy of the two thirds majority. I think that really underscores that we are talking about a deeply loathed expression. Never before has there been such a groundswell to make an express exception to the First Amendment for any other expression. That's a vote of no confidence in that particular message, and I'm flipping that around to say that underscores how very strongly speech protective the Supreme Court decision was. Take whatever you consider to be the offensive expression, the most controversial expression, the most taboo word. Those were the analogies in the Johnson case, and those same principles require protecting whatever is considered to be the analogous taboo expression today.
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