Family’s attorney, school superintendent provide opposing views
Published in the February 4-17, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
Click here to visit webpage with opposing view by MHUSD Superintendent Steve Betando
By William Becker
William Becker
In 1984, Gregory Lee Johnson, protesting outside of the Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas, poured kerosene on a U.S. flag and set it on fire. He was convicted under a Texas criminal statute.
Concluding Johnson’s First Amendment right of free expression had been violated, the United States Supreme Court overturned Johnson’s conviction. Flag desecration was thus declared a constitutional right regardless of who it offended.
What the courts have never been asked to decide —until now — is whether the celebration of our nation’s flag deserves the same level of constitutional protection. In our lawsuit against Morgan Hill Unified School District, Live Oak High School officials feared that self-identified “Mexican” students offended by the flag’s image would respond with violence.
But do those who threaten violence — or who simply claim to be offended by the display of our flag on Cinco de Mayo — have a constitutional right not to be offended?
Consider Sony Pictures’ recent decision to cancel the release of a satirical film lampooning North Korean leader Kim Jong Un following terror threats against theaters planning to show it. Or the murder of French cartoonists who satirically depicted the prophet Muhammad. In each case, violence — or the threat of it — was used to suppress ideas offensive to someone. Fear trumped freedom.
America’s founding fathers understood that dissent was vital to a free republic, and that the freedom to say things some people find offensive needed to be jealously guarded. Inoffensive speech requires no protection. And no one has a right to not be offended.
Why do the Mexican students feel they have a right not to be offended, and what about the flag is offensive to them? The Supreme Court has described our flag as “a symbol of national unity.”
Yet when a group of patriotic demonstrators sought to convey support for our lawsuit by hoisting the flag outside of Live Oak last year, the school fenced them (and their flags) out of students’ view, preferring instead to create a “unity” banner.
Our Constitution does not impose a one-day-per-year calendar restriction on the right to celebrate our flag. In Morgan Hill, race relations will fester until its schools begin teaching respect for our flag — the preeminent symbol of national unity — and freedom of expression, our only safeguard against political orthodoxy.
William J. Becker, Jr., Esq., is the founder and director of Freedom X, a nonprofit legal organization that promotes conservative and religious freedom of expression. Freedom X is lead counsel in Dariano v. Morgan Hill Unified School District, currently on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
