Summary: This weekend, as numerous football players and other athletes in sporting venues across America take a knee in defiance of Russia’s puppet in the White House, Trump cultists and so-called patriots have demonstrated their disdain for freedom all over social media by condemning the athletes who have taken a knee when the national anthem is played. These Trump cultists and “patriots” apparently neither know nor care much about American values. They do not know or do not care that the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled on several occasions that withholding participation in the Pledge of Allegiance or even taking a knee at the national anthem is perfectly constitutional. The Russian puppet in the White House is trying very hard to appropriate the national symbols and our national values for himself. Taking a knee is a powerful, uniquely American, way of saying “no.”
#TakeaKnee as if your life depends upon it.
#TakeaKnee as if your liberty depends upon it.
#TakeaKnee as if your pursuit of happiness depends upon it.
The ghosts of Lexington, of Concord, and of Bunker Hill demand it of your patriotism.
-------------------------------------
As numerous professional football players, accompanied by at least one major league baseball player, chose to take a knee during the playing of the national anthem, the Russian puppet in the oval office saw fit to continue the trumpertantrum he began late last week at a campaign rally in Alabama in which he chose to pick a fight with former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick about Kaepernick’s having knelt during the playing of the national anthem to protest police brutality against African-Americans.
This act of protest kneeling, which the ever adaptable, ever promiscuous English language has now christened “taking a knee,” has gone viral, and Donald Trump has only encouraged it by politicizing it. As a number of commentators have suggested, the Russian puppet in the Oval Office has managed to give political cachet and social respectability to conduct that, during the George W. Bush or Barack Obama administrations would have been met by most Americans with Stares of Wintry Disapproval.
However, by having turned taking a knee into a political phenomenon, The Donald has managed to swim deeply in the dank, fetid, fever swamps of America’s original sin of racism. Moreover, in his divisive encourage-the-Kremlin-by-dividing-America way, the Donald has provoked even lily white scions of Pale Privilege into hitherto unwonted expressions of empathy and solidarity with their African-American teammates.
Yet, while even high school athletes are standing up for freedom by kneeling down, Trump and his cultists are doing the Kremlin’s work for it by trying to create the impression that taking a knee is somehow “disrespectful” or unpatriotic. This comes almost directly out of the old Soviet criminal code which defined so-called anti-Soviet activities as criminal offenses for which the offender could be sent to some grim Siberian Gulag. One need not look too far beyond social media to see how little Trump and his cultists understand our American Constitution.
While Trump and the cultists would happily define taking a knee as some kind of new anti-Trump activity meriting incarceration in some grim new American Gulag, the blunt truth is that taking a knee is a perfectly constitutionally defensible form of protest. The First Amendment guarantees that
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
The rights guaranteed by the First Amendment are nonnegotiable. They are part of the fundamental constellation of freedom for which Americans have been willing to lay down their lives, to face foreign shot and foreign shell, foreign fevers and foreign steel, and for which they been willing to die on battlefields from Gettysburg to Galveston in the service of a vision of a more perfect union.
Yet, to borrow from G.K. Chesterton, who famously observed that “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried,” the American ideal itself has been found difficult and largely left untried. Americans love to talk about national symbols. Americans love to get dewy eyed when they hear the strains of the national anthem or see the American flag rippling in the breeze, but most Americans, particularly Trump cultists, have not the slightest understanding of the relationship between such symbols and the “city on a hill which cannot be hid” of which Massachusetts Puritan John Winthrop spoke in 1630, and which has become, since John F. Kennedy gave it new prominence in a January 9, 1961 address to the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth Of Massachusetts, an integral part of our political discourse.
Yet, as powerful as the national symbols are, they are not themselves the nation; they do not themselves embody the values we profess to represent; in and of themselves, they mean nothing. The Star-Spangled Banner is just a song written by a Maryland slaveholder lawyer. The flag the Star-Spangled Banner references is nothing more than a collection of pieces of cloth sewn artfully together.
But the union they symbolize means, and must mean, a great deal more than that. The preamble to the Constitution sums up the objective of the document in six words: To Form a More Perfect Union. And to form that more perfect union we Americans have been struggling for nearly two and a half centuries. We have struggled to expand the national table to make room for people of color, for women, for people of every faith and of no faith at all, for the disabled, and, most recently, for queerfolk.
Yet as we have inserted additional leaves into that national table, we have failed to integrate into our thinking one of the truest tests of any working democracy. For in a truly free and democratic society, the test of how well the society is functioning is not how well it protects the majority, how well it looks after the well off, the well-connected, the affluent, or the comfortable. The true test of how well our free and democratic society is working is how well it protects the rights of the dissenting and outspoken minority, how well it levels the playing field so that an African-American kid from the projects, the Latina child of migrant farmworkers, the working poor white kid of a single parent, the paralyzed child confronting a lifelong disability, or the queer person in a community that has had to learn how to live as if each day contained 25 hours, can enjoy the same breadth of opportunity and live the same American dream as the most privileged Pale Person in our society.
By that standard, America is failing the test. In his novel Hawaii, the late James Michener snuck in a rather acidulous observation that “Americans despise most freedoms.” Michener was right, most Americans are uncomfortable with freedom. Most Americans are uncomfortable with the idea that in a truly free and democratic society taking a knee is an outward and visible manifestation of what it is to be truly American. Moreover, most Americans don’t seem terribly comfortable with the idea that taking a knee should be something that in America does not and should not carry an adverse consequence.
Back in 1943, in the middle of World War II, the greatest existential crisis America has ever faced, the Supreme Court of the United States had before it a case involving a Jehovah’s Witness schoolchild from West Virginia who had not taken a knee during the playing of the national anthem, but who had declined, on religious grounds, to say the Pledge of Allegiance. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, (1943) 319 U.S. 624, the Court sided with the Jehovah’s Witness schoolchildren. In his majority opinion for the Court, Justice Robert Jackson observed that “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein....”
A generation later, a group of of school students in Des Moines, Iowa, wore black armbands to school in protest of the war in Vietnam. The school district reacted with the typical disdain for freedom to be expected from most school districts. The oldest members of the group were suspended, and litigation ensued. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the Court held for the students. In Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, (1969) 393 U.S. 503, the court upheld the right of pupils to engage in symbolic activity that was “closely akin to pure speech.” Writing for the majority, Justice Abe Fortas observed "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." Id. at 506.
Yet, notwithstanding the clear constitutional instruction in both Barnette and in Tinker, a large part of the American public still continues to believe that freedom is too dangerous to entrust to schoolchildren, athletes, or anyone else holding an unpopular view. Indeed, in Texas, schoolchildren are actually told that it is unlawful, and that they can be sent to jail for, not saying the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. and Texas flags. Elsewhere throughout the country, policies are in place in numerous local entities that fly in the face of the Constitution by mandating participation in flag salutes or standing for the national anthem.
However, under the clear constitutional teaching of Barnette and Tinker, no American citizen can be required to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance, any more than a citizen can be required to stand for the national anthem. It is, in fact, the absolute right of everyone of us to decline to participate in what many of us, in the Trump era, consider to be a well-nigh totalitarian exercise in idolatrous flag worship.
Now it may cause a certain amount of agita to that portion of the American public was subscribes to the Trump cult, or which otherwise despises most freedoms. But the heckler’s veto has never been recognized in American law. As much as it may irritate someone no end to see another person taking a knee, or declining to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance, the true test of a free and democratic society is not how well it protects the rights of the one who takes offense, but how well it protects the rights of the one who dissents, the one who chooses to take a knee or to remain silent or even seated during the pledge.
Because, in the final analysis, America was founded by dissenters. Ours is a nation conceived, as Abraham Lincoln so famously put it at Gettysburg, in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. How can we claim to be true to that founding vision if we insist upon denying to our fellow Americans the right to take a knee or to withhold participation in the Pledge of Allegiance? America does not exist to enforce some kind of communitarian adherence to an officially defined set of national orthodoxies.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. From Thomas Jefferson’s soaring words in the Declaration of Independence have come all of our law and our prophets.
We are a free and democratic society, born of dissent, made strong by disobedience, baptized in the blood and fire of a Revolution which has made a triumphal tour of the world. The struggle that began at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill continues on football fields across America as a new generation of Americans challenges our commitment to our revolutionary heritage, standing up by kneeling down.
Take a knee as if your lives depended upon it, take a knee as if your liberty depended upon it, take a knee as if your ability to pursue happiness depended upon it.
#TakeaKnee America.
