Vault Citizen said:
The previous year, in 2009, a group of Mexican students marked the holiday by walking around campus holding a Mexican flag. A group of white students responded by hanging a makeshift American flag from a tree and chanting "USA." According to the Chronicle, tensions flared and the two groups faced off with profanity and threats.
Little wonder that when some students showed up at school wearing T-shirts with American flags on them administrators decided to err on the side of caution.
It sounds like the school was just trying to avoid violence.
If there is going to be violence over wearing the flag of your own country inside your own country then this is itself is a problem. The students who are violent, threatening violence, or even just implying it, are the ones that need to be dealt with. What's more if your dealing with people visiting this country, or having sought/obtained citizenship here and are offended they should be slung back over the border, or even just flat out exiled if they were born here.
This gets to the root of cultural assimilation, and our problems with it. Basically we have people coming into the US who want to draw the benefits of US citizenship, but do not actually want to be Americans.
In the US the left wing has gotten so out of control in defending "civil liberties" that it has lost sight of common sense. Things having moved from protecting what might be quirky customs or the quiet observation of foreign traditions, to the right to speak only a foreign language, and now to force everyone in the US to adapt if someone who comes here from another country is offended by the flag of our country. This is what you call "snowballing" and it's a common problem, what starts out fairly reasonable gradually builds up into utter insanity one precedent at a time.
I can see why the courts made the ruling that they did, after all with all of the other precedents established over a period of time, such as saying you have to adapt to someone who doesn't want to speak English or whatever, it gives weight to arguements by immigrants having the right to force everyone to adapt to their whims, and to be offended by something like The American flag. After all we've established the precedent that you don't have to be culturally American, or even support the country to live here, draw benefits, and even have a say in how the goverment operates.
I might not be articulating this well, but it's one of the big reasons why I oppose a lot of civil issues on principle, even if I might agree with what the people promoting those issues are trying to accomplish. I very much concerned about where such things wind up going in the long term. Oftentimes leading to the perception of me being racist, bigoted, misogynistic, or whatever else. You can point to cases of The American Flag being effectively banned in the US (even if just in schools) as an example of exactly why you need to be careful about civil matters no matter how well intentioned.
While fairly hardcore, I do believe we need a mechanism by which citizenship can be removed from immigrants, until a few generations down the road. It's one of the only ways any kind of "common sense" modifications to civil libertiess are going to work. Basically my attitude is that if someone is offended by the flag of their own country they don't belong in that country drawing the benefits of the taxpayers for things like a free education. I don't care if people want to honor the heritage of their forefathers or whatever, but when it goes as far as being offended or violent at the depiction of what is their own flag (being citizens) that is a problem.
Now yes, rounding up a bunch of people who are upset over the US Flag and sending them back to poverty in Mexico might sound harsh, but at the same time I see no reason why we should be tolerating this. What's more when dealing with people born in the US who are raised that way, exiling them might seem even more harsh, but at the same time there is no reason why we should have to deal with that either. As far as I'm concerned dumping them out on an island someplace and saying "there are peopl ehere, anyone who wants them as citizens can come and get them" isn't entirely inappropriate, after all if nobody wants them, why should we? Yeah, anyone who hates on the country they were born in that way is "damaged goods" to the point where I honestly am becoming low on sympathy.
There is also a connected side issue here, where students have been declined the full rights of adults within the school system, intended to cut down on gang violence and so on. This was a bad idea at the time and feeds into this entire problem. After all if the schools can't selectivly ban people from wearing gang-affiliated or crime-associated clothing or whatever for civil rights reasons, it was instead put into a position of more blanket bans that didn't single anything out. With the right to protest that taken away, it's become possible for the school system to ban things like the US flag for the same reason, of avoiding violence of a differant type.... again not well articulated, but another side of the entire issue.
When it comes to civil liberties putting the genie back into the bottle is never easy, and almost always comes at the expense of a lot of nastiness. In this case we're seeing a situation where ironically those protections on free expression are being used to oppress free expression as we've created an enviroment where a minority of people (overall) who feel the US flag offends the spirit of a foreign holiday have the system on their side.
The failure of the court system, and I can see why things turned out rhe way they did with these prcedents, should make this a major national concern. Of course to be brutally honest with so many left wingers in power, I can't really see there being a crackdown here. Maybe I'll be proven wrong in the long term but I can't see Barak Obama throwing his weight behind the needed reforms to ensure Americans can wear their own flag in school. He doesn't pass laws but the opinion of The President can have a major effect on such things.
