Flag Burning and Free Speech: Texas v. Johnson
In the case of Texas v. Johnson, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the state of Texas could not prosecute Gregory Lee Johnson for burning the flag without violating the First Amendment (Goldstein xi). Johnson was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (RCYB) who was one of several protestors prosecuted under a Texas law for burning a flag in front of the Dallas City Hall. Johnson appealed his case to the Supreme Court, which overturned his conviction and ruled that flag desecration was protected expression under the First Amendment. This paper reviews Robert Goldstein's exploration of the case, with particular emphasis on Justices William Brennan, Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William Rehnquist. The paper also includes several analyses of the significance and implications of the case by independent legal scholars.
Goldstein begins by framing the issue of flag burning as a "symbolic fight over a symbol" (Goldstein xi). He points out similar fights over the Confederate flag and Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez. Goldstein explains that, in such cases, the fight over the symbol is actually a fight over what the symbol represents. In the flag burning cases, therefore, the actual fight was over the tradition and politics that the flag represented.
Goldstein begins by tracing the political history of "protecting the flag." The book traces the U.S. flag from its relatively inglorious creation at the birth of the nation. Goldstein notes that the "stars and stripes" only began to hold any significant degree of symbolism for Americans during the Civil War, when Confederate troops fired on a flag-draped Fort Sumter (Goldstein 4). The first "flag protection movement" (FPM) blossomed in the late 1800s, after the war. The FPM fought first against commercial exploitation, and then turned its attention to what it called selfish and unpatriotic desecrations of the flag (Golds...