The Backgorund of the Case Gregory Lee Johnson was arrested and charged with violating a Texas statute that prevented the desecration of a venerated object. In 1984 during the Republican National Convention, held that year in Dallas Texas, Johnson had accepted an American flag from a fellow protester which had been taken from a flagpole of one of the protest’s targeted buildings. After unfurling the flag, he soaked it in kerosene and then lit the flag on fire. Protestors nearby gathered around the flag and chanted the phrase “America, the red, white, and blue, we spit on you”. Although none of the participents or bystanders were physically injured or threatened, several witnesses testified that the burning of the flag was offensive to them. …show more content…
The court concluded that Texas’ flag-descretion statute was “not drawn narrowly enough” to encompass only acts that were likely to result in a serious disturbance of the peace. The Court stated Johnson’s charge for burning the flag in such circumstances was “unconstitutional” because of the First Ammendment, resulting in the recognition of symbolic speech. Texas didn’t clamied an interest in support of Johnson's conviction that is unrelated to the suppression of expression and would allow the use the O’Brien test, whereby an important governmental interest in regulating nonspeech can justify incidental limitations on First Amendment freedoms when speech and nonspeech elements are combined in the same course of conduct. An interest in preventing breaches of the peace isn’t implicated on this record. Expression may not be prohibited on the basis that bystanders take serious offense to the event that may disturb the peace, since the Government cannot assume that every expression of a provocative idea will incite a riot, but must look to the situation surrounding the event. Johnson's dissatisfaction with the Federal Government's policies also did not fall within the class of "fighting words" likely to be seen as a personal insult or an invitation to start a brawl. The question at hand with this case is whether or not flag burning …show more content…
Johnson was settled, flag descretion laws continued to try and prohibit similar events from occuring. The Flag Desecration Amendment, which is often referred to the Flag-Burning Amendment, is a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow the U.S. Congress to prohibit the physical "desecration" of the American flag. However, even though the law is known as the Flag-Burning Amendment, it would permit the prohibition of all forms of flag desecration, which may take forms other than burning, such as using the flag for clothing or other manufactured products. According to the First Amendment Center, a poll in the summer of 2005 found that 63% of Americans opposed amending the constitution to outlaw flag burning, a 10% increase from results in a 2004 poll. As stated in an article written by Charles Babington, a Washington Post Staff Writer, in 2006 on June 27 the Senate rejected adding the proposed amendment to the constitution by a single vote. An arguement went on for two days, filled with political calculations and sharp disputes over the limits of free speech, before a decision was finally