BOSTON (Reuters) - Three Yale University students, including a Briton and a Greek national, have been charged in a case involving the burning of a U.S. flag outside a Connecticut house, a court official said on Wednesday.
Said Hyder Akbar, 23, Nikolaos Angelopoulos, 19, and Farhad Anklesaria, 19, were arrested on Tuesday and charged in New Haven Superior Court with reckless
endangerment, arson, breach of peace, criminal mischief and other offenses
If you begin to doubt the tolerance of the great unwashed American public, imagine what would happen to you, as an American, if you went to Greece and burned a Greek flag or went to Pakistan and drew a cartoon of Mohamed or went to Britain and said grace before eating.
How burning anything can be protected as speech is beyond me. I did okay on that part of the SAT where they ask you "spoon is to cereal as ______ is to paper", but speech and burning? Yet another example of our pasty judiciary bending over backwards to kiss the ass of those who would stick a fork in ours. Besides, flag burning is so done. It's like wearing Doc Martins, a Che Guevara t-shirt and a PLO keffiyeh, radical just like every other poseur lefty college kid and ultimately as pointless.
1 comment:
What this article fails to point out is that the flag was on a flagpole which was attached to the house, and the burning of it could have burnt the house down. It's a deliberate misrepresentation, if you ask me, because the article makes it seem as though these guys are in trouble for doing something that's protected under free speech.
I agree, it's crap that these idjits think they were doing something spectacularly brilliant by burning an American flag as a political statement, but the only reason they were arrested is because they torched private property AND recklessly endangered others. Any "normal" flag burning would have been ignored.
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