People's Republic of Muncie (Indiana)

[MrRepublican]

In the land of the free and the home of the AMA, this does not surprise me. I am sure the mayor has been hanging around AMA HQ a little too long and the litiphobia with which that organization milks its members is starting to rub off on him.

www.wane.com/Global/story.asp?S=2210785

[Cablemender]

Well the obvious question is, "Who's civil liberties are being defended in this threatened lawsuit?" Is it the rights of the campers, the campground staff, citizens of the city, or?

I'm waiting for the day when some city or county who gets threatened makes the "civil liberty defenders" pay to take the case to court.. and don't bother fighting them. Lose the case, and let some Federal Judge be the guy, and the CLU be seen as the people who hate the flag. It won't take long before there will be a backlash and it will render them less powerful than they are.

Of course if the Mayor's design is to get rid of the campground, perhaps to use the land for some other purpose, I can't think of a better way then to ban a camper from flying a little American Flag off their awning pole.

Don't these CLUs have anything better to do? People are complaining about the cost of health care, so why don't they go do something useful like badger some HMOs or pharmacutical companies instead of browbeating a community and a bunch of folks trying to just enjoy a few days at a campground?

[ctdahle]

Wait a minute cablemender, are you saying that the Indiana Civil Liberties Union should NOT have filed suit to defend the right to fly the flag?

If a group of Swedish tourists visited Muncie and they wanted to put the Swedish flag on thier camper are you saying they should not be allowed to do so?

When we impose regulations that prohibit people from making free speech displays of national pride we are imposing precisely the sort of regulations that the First Amendment was designed to protect.

Freedom is messy.

[Cablemender]

Well, did I misunderstand the issue?

My understanding of the issue is this:

The mayor put a ban on all flags except the American flag and the POW/MIA flag. His intent was to ban Confederate Flags, but it didn't say that, only all but the above two.

The ICLU threatened suit based on the idea of discrimination of all other flags.

The Mayor, to avoid suit, changed the policy to ban them all equally.

How does this make the ICLU defender of the flag?

I still think the guy(s) with the American flags should fly it, and force the authorities to arrest them or issue them a violation for flying it. Then we'll see how well it flies with the public and federal lawmakers.

And what are they gonna do about flag-designed picnic ware, or red, white and blue beer coolers?

My own feelings are that people should be allowed to fly whatever they want. If they are out there flying Swastikas or flags of obvious hateful message, fine, at least people can identify who they are and keep clear of them. The problem I have with the Confederate flag is there are some who use it as a symbol of hatred, and some who use it as a symbol of heritage. I don't know how to tell them apart, thus I think it is wrong to simply assume because it's on someone's vehicle they are the KKK.

I work with two guys who do civil war reenactments on the weekends during the summer and fall, and they have all kinds of stuff like that, yet are among the most unbiased people I know. (BTW they play Blue or Grey, depending on need; they have authentic outfits and period weapons for each.)

Pensacola had a big flag fight two years ago. The city has been under 5 flags over its history, and one of those was the Confederate States. The 5 flags displays always included the Confederate flag, and the racial hatred aspects were argued and came to a sort of draw in the community. Because historians pointed out that what we call the Confederate flag was actually a type of battle flag, and the Confederacy (i.e. the government of it) used a different one, the City of Pensacola did away with them, replacing them with the actual national flag of the Confederacy, which has a blue field like our national flag with a white stars, and three horizontal stripes - red over white over red. You can see it here next to the American flag.

www.fiestaoffiveflags.org/

The county, however, voted to keep the Confederate style they've always had.

[MrRepublican]

Yes, you have it correctly interpreted, Tom. The ban on the US flag was added later in an effort to save the City of Muncie from further litigation costs from the ICLU.

Pathetic, and further exemplification of what the trial lawyers association's influence has done to America.

Does anybody know what the population of lawyers is compared to doctors here in the US?

[Galvin]

I don't see the problem... except with some mayor overstepping his authority and going up against the first amendment to making display of all flags illegal in a lame attempt to make the display of the Confederate flag illegal in his town, thereby calling attention to exactly the thing he wished to minimize.

It is one of the nice things about this country that even expressions of unpopular opinions are legal; even Nazi flags fly at White Supremecist and KKK ralllies and it is left to the individual to decide whether they accept the implied message or not. Most reasonable people do not. The other nice thing about that is that it allows the immediate identification of those who hold such views by those who don't agree with them or care to be associated with them. They are usually then held up as bad examples.

While displaying such symbols may be out of the mainstream and persuade some people into thinking that they are some sort of recruiting tool for the fascist fringe, the opposite is usually true. They usually serve just to further marginalize those who display them.

The ICLU has rightly filed suit against this guy's ill-considered attempt to ban display of all flags in an attempt to prevent the display of those he regards as objectionable. The Confederate Flag has unfortunately become the symbol of racism in both those who promote it and those who oppose it. This is unfortunate because the war in which it was involved was more about states' rights than freeing slaves and a lot of good and honorable people fought and died under it. This is just the observation of a Massachusetts Yankee and is not intended to be a defense of the racism it has come to be the symbol of in some people's eyes.

I was involved in a controversy years ago over the display of the swastika on box art and models of German aircraft of used WWII. The aguments against its display were, to say the least, vehement, because the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis were still very fresh in the minds of many in Europe.

It is also still illegal in parts of Europe to display the Hackenkreuz or Swastika primarily because there are thousands of people still living who were directly affected by the brutality and inhumanity of some of those who were represented by it. But the sentiment against its display is slowly fading as those who were the victims of those who wore it and fought for continue to die off. At some point its display will become solely a historical issue and not one of causing pain and suffering in certain people merely by its being displayed.

The official banning of such symbols as the Swastika and the Confederate Flag only serves to make them more desireable in the minds of the immature and impressionable by giving them the cachet that comes from being a form of forbidden fruit. It also smacks of the same odious process that results in book burning when the self appointed arbiters of morality decide to tell us what is good for us and what we may or may not see.

History is what it is and the evil and injustice represented by these symbols don't cease to exist just because someone decides to ban them. You can't change history just by sweeping it under the rug. Better to let those who are determined to display them do so if they insist on being provocative but take the time to explain to the young and impressionable exactly what they are and what they have represented so that the evils associated with them never take hold again.

The banning of these symbols is a free-speech issue and the mayor has gone well beyond his authority. Taking his reasoning a logical step further, should we then ban display pictures of the elephant, symbol of the GOP, and the donkey, symbol of the Democratic Party because each might cause controversy between those who don't believe in the pinciples of the other?

[Cablemender]

Here are some data from the 2000 Census:

Population
Total: 281,421,906
Men: 137,916,186
Women: 143,505,720 (not counting Michael Jackson)

Employed Civilian Population >16 yrs old
Total: 129,721,512
Men: 69,091,443
Women: 60,630,069

Legal Occupations
Total: 1,412,737 (1.1%)
Men: 747,170 (1.1%)
Women: 665,567 (1.1%)

Healthcare Diagnosing & Treating Practitioners & Technical Occupations
Total: 4,144,066 (3.2%)
Men: 1,210,571 (1.8%)
Women: 2,933,494 (4.8%)

Lawyers aren’t broken out separate from paralegals, clerks, judges, etc.
Doctors aren’t broken out from nurses, Phys. Assistants, Nurse Practitioners, etc.
In fact, among the top women’s occupations, RNs ranked #3, and other nursing, psychiatric nursing, and home health aides ranked #6

But using just the numbers above, it looks like the medicos have the legalos by
2.9:1 (Total), 1.6:1 (Men), and 4.4:1 (Women).

Dunno if that's useful or not, Mark, but those are the best numbers I could find with a quick look around.

[Cablemender]

One Massachusetts Yankee to another, I think you said it mighty well. I agreed 100% with your post.

To clarify what I said earlier about the CLUs, my big problem with them is that they weild this giant club - the threat of expensive legal action - to bring opponents to their knees, and very often, most often in the cases I see in the news, they cause so much collateral damage by the way they operate, it does as much or more damage than good. In this case, they forced a mayor to ban all flags in order to eliminate the one was trying to get rid of. In their zeal to look out for the rights of one small group, they ended up robbing everyone of what should be a basic right. THAT is my problem with them, not that they want to defend the rights of a minority group. I felt the same when the ACLU in their zeal to whack the Boy Scouts over the homosexuality issue pushed a bunch of kids out the door of a meeting place, a public building. I believe they could have held back from an action like that, which really only punished the kids, and simply inconvenienced the organization.

I don't know why people fear things like Confederate flags or Nazi flags to the point where they feel their display must be neutralized. Perhaps it is a feeling of mistrust in the justice system, or that by allowing that display they are somehow endorsing the biases and hatred by not fighting it. Your discussion of how the taboo of these symbols can be a magnet for young people looking to rebel is dead on. Putting those groups right out in the spotlight does make them have to stand on their own merits, or fall from the lack of them. Over years, when the klan has shown up for a rally somewhere, they have always been met with such public resistance and protests they find it hardly worth the effort anymore. The number of them who travel to rallys has diminished to the point where they couldn't get a group discount on pizzas, let alone hotel reservations. This tells me that the best way to cure things like that is to let them rot in the sunlight, not grow in the dark.

I think much of that fear crosses over into other areas as well, like gun ownership. People who oppose them, at least the many I've discussed the issue with, aren't so opposed to hunters and sport shooters as they are to criminals getting them, and the fastest, simplest solution they grab on to is banning them. This begs the question why the myriad of laws they so strongly favored over the last 30 years aren't working if we have to resort to banning. Maybe a better way would be to tighten up the penalty phase of the exercise like we've done with DUI penalties. In the same way as allowing the public displays of "opposing" flags points the finger at who those groups really are, the idjits behind the triggers will also show up better and they can be dealt with separate from responsible citizens owning firearms.

[MrRepublican]

Tom:

Yours is a very fair appraisal of the circumstances in Muncie. Lawyers (and liberals) tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater when presenting their case in an effort to impose their will on others, and (in this case) the US flag was the "baby". The ICLU suit forced the Muncie mayor to run scared rather than to stand and fight for the symbol of our nation.

Thanks for those stats. I would be interested to see what those stats looked like 50 years ago. I'll bet the lawyers to health care workers ratio was a small fraction of what it is today.

[stetto]

Hmm, so THIS may be why I can't find reruns of the Dukes of Hazzard, huh?