"America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You've got to want it bad, because it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say, "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil who is standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the 'land of the free'? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the 'land of the free.'"

I wish I could attribute this to one of our honorable government officials, but alas, this speech was beautifully given by President Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas) in Robert Reiner and Aaron Sorkin's 1995 movie The American President.

Yesterday the Senate voted on a Constitutional Amendment to allow Congress to ban flag burning. Another crazy attempt to amend the Constitution in an election year, but what's really scary about this one is that it almost succeeded in passing both houses of Congress. An amendment to the Constitution needs to be passed by two third of the Senate, House, and state legislatures. The amendment already passed the house and earned 66 of the 67 votes needed to be approved by the Senate. That's right; we were one vote shy of changing 230 years of precedent by making flag desecration illegal.

Senator Dianne Feinstein is one of my favorite members of the Senate. She hard to classify into one ideological camp which means that she actually thinks before she speaks and votes--this is essentially my criteria for respecting (if not agreeing with) a government official. She was the main Democratic sponsor of the anti-flag burning amendment and had this to say in her speech on the Senate floor about why she was sponsoring the bill:

I, too, have always looked at the flag as the symbol of our democracy, our shared values, our commitment to justice, our remembrance to those who have sacrificed to defend these principles.

But it is just that, a symbol.

Don't get me wrong, my blood would boil at the site of a flag burning because the stars and stripes to me are the symbol of this great country that sheltered my great grandparents, embraced my grandparents and helped them succeed, allowed my parents to go to college, and allows me to write, speak, rant, or otherwise pontificate about whatever I damn well please.

Sure, the even the thought of someone burning the flag makes my foot tap faster, but so do a lot of things. For example it makes me mad that ideologues block the advancement of stem-cell research even though it has the potential to save millions of lives. My anger rises when I think of the millions of people don't get the education needed to eek out a living in the richest nation in the world. It makes me hit the roof when I walk to work every morning and in view of the Capitol and White House with homeless on every bench and little's being done. I get pretty damn agitated when I read in the news every single day about North Korea and Iran getting nukes while our military is out of resources, out of patience, and almost out of time in Iraq.

But most of all, I get angry when people call me un-American for opposing this amendment. I agree with the founding fathers that freedom of speech and protest--tangible things--are more important than any symbol. A symbol has to stand for something to matter.