The Left Coaster: Burning the Flag Burning Amendment

What I do care about is the desecration of the Constitution. Only once in over two hundred years has this country stupidly used the Amendment route to ban a behavior. Our overarching law is all about defining rights that cannot be taken away by legislation, expanding those rights to include all of us and protecting us from unequal or unjust application of laws. The rightwingers who see Constitutional Amendments banning abortion, same sex marriage and whatever else in the world that they don’t like as the remedy for their intolerance and bigotry that will not pass Constitutional muster in legislation are people who do not revere the Constitution. Their understanding of it is as distorted as their reading of the New Testament.

Steve Guillard:

The best thing about American journalism is that anyone can do it. No license, no training. If Rachel Carson wants to write Silent Spring or Ralph Nader Unsafe at Any Speed, they can do that. No one would ask them for their reporter’s permit.

You don’t get the right to pick and choose rights. If we all have rights, they need to be protected. If we don’t, don’t expect people to care when your rights are violated…

Kos won’t put this on his front page, but I will.

It’s always painful when places you thought might be one of the last few outposts of saniety’s [sic] owner and other readers decide they’re willing to trade your life away, and the lives of others away, and ultimately their own lives away, because for some reason, they genuinely don’t understand what’s at stake. Words are important, and so tonight, at daily Kos, I as one of the written off, am going to write a diary for the first time, raise my voice, and once AGAIN tell so called ‘friends’ how much they’re hurting the people next to them. To say nothing of how much they’re cutting their own throats in the process.

There is more that a week’s worth of background/context for this discussion, but it’s 2:30 am and I can’t track it all down right now. The comments on stormcoming’s diary pretty much encapsulate the debate, though.