Flag Day in america is often a holiday of honor and national pride, each day to figuratively” rally around the flag.” Flag Day has its origins within the Second Continental Congress. On June 14, 1777, the Congress adopted a flag design, specified as “That the flag of the us be thirteen stripes, alternate white and red; how the union be thirteen stars, white in the blue field, representing a new Constellation.”
The original using this design would have been to be the flag carried into battle (the Revolutionary War was still being well under way). The flag was first carried within the Battle of Brandywine on September 11, 1777. Of these beginning of the usa flag, it had been shown on naval ships and eventually became accepted and honored through the new U . s . citizens and by foreign nationals too. In U.S. flag commanded the naval warship “the Ranger” on what the flag was placed. Upon arriving inside a French port, the crew with the French naval ships saluted the flag.
The initial design is credited to Betsy Ross, and contains the familiar circle selection of the 13 stars – for your original 13 colonies. Eventually because country grew, the amount of stars had to grow at the same time. The following version had 15 stars, as Vermont and Kentucky joined the Union. This new flag happened in 1795. The flag went through numerous iterations as new states were put into the country. However a concern was brewing over what sort of flag had been misused.
Prior to 1897 many opportunists took the nationalistic feelings drilled into the flag’s image as avenues to showcase their wares or political opinions. The flag became the backdrop to advertising or other questionable purposes. Like a marketer could post an add on a flag and wave it around in a crowd.
An endeavor is made to get federal legislation passed that will ban desecration of the flag. After failing on the federal level, Illinois, South dakota, and Pennsylvania released state laws in 1897 that made it illegal to position just about any markings about the flag, to make use of the flag in any sort of marketing, as well as to mutilate, trample, deface, or defile the flag.
It wasn’t until 1968 that flag desecration became federal law. A flag was burned in The big apple City’s Central Park to protest the Vietnam War. Congress then passed a whole new law making it illegal to knowingly cast contempt upon any flag of the usa by “publicly mutilating, defacing, defiling, burning or trampling upon it.”
This law continues to be challenged many times since. At the heart in the issue is finding the balance between flag desecration and freedom of speech rights. Inside a 1972 decision, the final Court held that Massachusetts couldn’t prosecute a person who wore a flag on the seat of his pants. In 1974 the Supreme Court decided that freedom of speech overrode flag desecration in the case involving someone who affixed a peace sign in the flag in protest with the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.
Perhaps the thorniest issue of contemporary times may be the technique words “under God” inside the Pledge of Allegiance. In 2002 a Ninth Circuit Federal appeals court decided that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional due to the line “one nation, under God.” In 2004, however, the final Court declined to listen for much the same case, thereby leaving the inclusion of “under God” intact in the Pledge of Allegiance for some of the nation.
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