Is flying the U.S. flag the wrong way up unlawful? Right here’s what the Supreme Courtroom has to say
Is displaying an the wrong way up U.S. flag authorized in Texas?
This was a query lately requested by a poster on Reddit Fort Price who snapped a photograph of an the wrong way up flag flying under a blue MAGA banner.
“Isn’t that like unlawful?,” the poster requested.
Technically, flying the flag the wrong way up will not be desecration of Outdated Glory however, according to the U.S. Flag Code, a “sign of dire misery in cases of maximum hazard to life or property.”
Rulings from the U.S. Supreme Courtroom have rendered moot the steering from the flag code.
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U.S. Supreme Courtroom weighs in on the flag and the appropriate to expression
In excessive circumstances, such because the burning of the flag, the Supreme Court has ruled, twice, that desecrating the nation’s flag is protected expression by the First Modification.
Within the first case, Texas v. Johnson, Gregory Lee Johnson burned a flag on the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas. Johnson was arrested for breaking a Texas legislation, fined $2,000 and sentenced to a 12 months in jail. His case went to the excessive court docket that affirmed a reversal of the unique verdict by the Texas Courtroom of Felony Appeals.
“If there’s a bedrock precept underlying the First Modification, it’s that the Authorities could not prohibit the expression of an concept just because society finds the thought itself offensive or unpleasant,” wrote Justice William Brennan, citing the Texas v. Johnson case.
In response, Congress handed an anti-flag burning legislation in 1989 that the Supreme Courtroom struck down a 12 months later in United States v. Eichman as unconstitutional.
An the wrong way up flag: A prop for protests or sign for assist
Many see the inversion of the flag as an indication of disrespect, but it surely has historically been used as a name for assist by people and teams. Sailors have used it to sign their vessel is in hassle. It’s a extensively employed methodology to sign for assist.
Extra lately, it has been utilized by protesters from each ends of the ideological divide to point out their displeasure — from activists protesting the end of national abortion rights to the warfare in Iraq to hordes of Donald Trump supporters breaching the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021..
“That was probably the most highly effective method for me to show my misery over the continuation of the warfare in Iraq,” mentioned Donald Vance throughout an anti-war protest in Modesto, California, in 2000.
