Flag burning shouldn’t be thought of as a kind of sacrilege. Flags are symbols of nations, and many nations merit great respect. But they’re not sacred. Holy Mother Russia? And how many god-emperors have there been?

Political movements to ban flag-burning in the U.S. have always struck me as misguided. One of the very most important reasons why it is unethical for an American to burn a U.S. flag is that he contradicts himself in the very act of burning it. He relies, with utter confidence, on a scrupulous adherence by the law to the widest possible interpretation of the rights noted in the Constitution as being god-given. He relies, with near equal confidence, on the public tradition of tolerating all sorts of outrageous provocation, so long as it’s not an infringement of the rights of others. And then he calls his nation oppressive. Chutzpah.

Those who burn the flags of decent nations merely let slip the mask that they would have hiding their essential wrongheadedness or worse.