American Idolatry

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The Fourth of July is an excellent day to ponder the distinction between symbols and idols. Many residents will hang an American flag outside their home on this day to show their love and respect for America. But many of us who revere the symbol will recall our disgust that what the symbol represents is being debased at an accelerated pace. Meanwhile, many conservative lawmakers this summer and fall would have us idolizing what is, once the reality behind the symbol is lost, just a piece of fabric.

It is not just the debate on the constitutional amendment that is so distressing, with its all-too-common combination of craven Republican pandering to intolerance and Democratic cowardice—although that debate in itself was breathtaking for the disregard the amendment’s backers have for the bedrock values of the Constitution and for their own intellectual inconsistency. “Principles are not creatures of convenience,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, said at one point on the Senate floor, even as he defended circumscribing the First Amendment because “the American people” are offended when a First Amendment expression of dissent includes burning the flag as opposed to burning, say, copies of the Constitution.

Frankly, I would be more upset by those who would burn the Constitution, both literally and figuratively, for their convenience—as would Hatch and his conservative colleagues in Congress. One of the most chilling threads running through much of the right’s rhetoric is the vitriol they direct at “unelected judges” who are merely doing that they are supposed to do in a democracy: serving as a check against a legislative and executive branch that otherwise unrestrained would usurp minority rights and would replace the rule of law with the rule of the mob—or a mob boss.
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