Justice Elena Kagan had a similar question. If a city wanted to use its flagpoles for a community-building program, but wanted to try to place some limits on it, she asked, would the city have to allow someone to raise a flag bearing a swastika? When Staver again responded that the answer was yes, Kagan suggested that, as a result, cities would not actually be able to implement such programs “because no city is going to want to put up a swastika or a KKK flag or something like that.”
(Emphasis mine.)
Oh, Elena, you sweet summer child. I wish I shared your optimism.
How long before Boston shuts down their flag policy completely? I give it exactly as long as it takes for The Satanic Temple to submit an application for one of their flags:
The Satanic Temple exists for the sole purpose of preventing the US from unreasonably favoring Christianity over atheism. They don’t actually worship Satan, which is a common misconception.
And yeah. I’d rather have a Satanic Temple flag up than a swastika. But you know that’s coming. The swastika attempt, I mean. “We’ve never turned down a flag request.”
TST is great. As you note, they don’t actually worship Satan or believe in anything supernatural at all, but the name alone riles up Christians. At the same time, they can’t be written off as a joke like the Flying Spaghetti Monster stuff.
I suspect that Boston couldn’t even refuse to fly a swastika without violating the 1A, but even if they could find some narrow way of excluding truly offensive symbols, they’d have no such luck with TST. Christians will not be happy about that and the solution will be to shut down the flag program completely.
As an atheist I don’t feel the need for a Satanic goat to protect me from the Christians. Sure, who doesn’t admire its copulatory capacity, but unlike our herdsman ancestors, not enough to get all mystical.
Especially since there already is an atheist symbol approved for military headstones. Although there too I don’t hold science in such high esteem either. I don’t trust science as a virtue unto itself. Can’t cotton to the humanist symbol either. Where’s the skeptic’s symbol option ?
BTW: the sandhill crane represents peace and family happiness, the pomegranate wisdom.
TST would be all too happy to never display their symbols on government property, as long as all other institutions were held to the same rules. But in the meantime, they have been fairly effective in getting these kinds of things shut down.
This Boston thing looks like one of those “what could possibly go wrong” scenarios where everyone can see what could possibly go wrong.
If the allegation is that by allowing a nongovernmental flag to be displayed next to the state’s that constitutes an endorsement… then does that mean the city was endorsing every other cause or organization that ever raised a flag there? The mind boggles. And if to the contrary that is a neutral space for everyone, then it’s for everyone.
The so-called “Christian flag” lame as it may seem is not inherently inciting a crime or disruptive of public peace, nor obscene. So Boston had a high, high bar to clear to justify treating it different from the others if the display was “open to all”.
Kagan does have a prescient point though: the only answer for Boston or any other city that does this sort of thing but who don’t want to let everyone participate, is to just stop doing it altogether.
God cannot be “under God.” That’s a logical impossibility.
Continuing with this theme, since the US pledge of allegiance does say “under God,” this is a sign that a Christian’s political allegiance is under, or subordinate, to his allegiance to God. What you said is equivalent to taking a married man whose parents are still alive, and saying that his duty to his wife invalidates his duty to his parents.
Disagree. Allegiance is a unitary thing, unlike duty, which can take many forms, among them filial duty and uxorial duty. Also, subordination does NOT equate to invalidation.
Careful about seeing what we want to see, based on our opinion of those using it today.
More likely they weren’t even thinking too much about it and just half-arsed it. The denominations of origin don’t strike me as likely so aligned (at least any more than general society at the time), this latter controversy seems to me more like one of those cases of unfortunate “takeover” of symbols.
(ETA: I would not be surprised if whoever they put in charge of half-arsing it first thought to use something like the British Navy White Ensign)
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