The Controversial Issue Of Flag Burning Philosophy Essay

The Controversial Issue Of Flag Burning Philosophy Essay There is a proposed amendment to make flag burning illegal. Congress tried to pass the Flag Protection Act of 1989, but the act failed because it is seen as a form of public protection.   There have been other attempts to pass legislation to protect the American flag but all of the attempts have failed so far. Flag burning is very controversial because people have different definitions of what freedom of speech means and what our flag stands for. This essay explores these definitions from the proponents viewpoint for a law protecting the flag and the opponents view point against such a law. The most debated question being asked at this time is:   is flag burning protected under the First Amendment guaranteeing the freedom of speech? It all depends on how a person defines the flag and interprets the First Amendment. In order to help answer this question lets being by defining what a flag is. The proponents (veterans, Citizens Flag Alliance, and other organizations of this type) of the amendment for protection of the flag define the flag as a cultural artifact with meaning significance, and usage determined by the particular system employing it (Guenter 18). Some flag historians have recognized the impact of culture on the shifting significance and usage of the national banner, although no one has ventured a full-scale probe of the subject (Guenter 16). The flag in the beginning was a symbol of freedom and enlightenment. The flag design has even changed. The very first flag contained thirteen stars that were in a circle with the red and white stripes. As the nation grew so did the flag, until the flag became what we know of it today. The proponents also feel that, the flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever (www.legion.org/flagcode.htm). It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkin or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard (www.legion.org/flagcode.htm). Advertising signs should not be fastened to a staff or halyard from which the flag is flown. No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform (www.legion.org/falgcode.htm).   However, a flag patch may be affixed to the uniform of military personnel, firemen, policemen, and members of patriotic organizations. The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing. Therefore, the lapel flag pin being a replica should be worn on the left lapel near the heart (www.legion.org/flagcode.htm).   The American flag is known through out the world as a symbol of freedom, prosperity, and even enlightenment.   The American flag is a result of our (United States) revolt against Britain.   The opponents view of the flag is clearly different.   The opponents of this amendment define a flag like the New American Webster Handy College Dictionary. Which states, a flag is a piece of cloth bearing a design for display as a signal, standard, etc. (286). According to the opponents of the amendment a flag is just the rectangular piece of material that has stars and stripes on it. Excluding clothing, hats, napkins, and any other item that contains the red, white, and blue colors with stars and stripes. The proponents of this amendment define the flag as any piece of material that is representative of the pattern that we (society) know as a flag. While the opponents of this amendment believe that the flag is just the piece of  Ã‚   material that is for display purposes, viewed as a standard. The two sides of this argument have clearly defined their positions yet they fail to be specific. Both side of this controversy look to the First Amendment for clarification.  Ã‚   In the first amendment of the American constitution it states, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise there of; or abridge the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceable to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances   (Constitution of the United States). The proponents of the flag burning amendment believe that the burning of a flag does not fall under the protection of the First amendment. The reason is because burning a flag is not an expression of speech but rather an act. In the case of Texas V. Johnson, Chief Justice William Rehnquist stated that flag burning is the equivalent of an inarticulate grunt or roar that is . . . most likely to be indulged in not to express any particular idea, but to antagonize others (Stephens Scheb 446). He also goes on to state, the flag is the symbol of our Nation, a uniqueness that justifies a governmental prohibition against flag burning (Stephens Scheb 446). According to the opponents of the flag burning amendment, this amendment not only applies to pure speech but writing also.   Rather, the opponents of the flag burning amendment feel that the Fist Amendment potentially protects communication of any kind.   Protest, demonstrations, performances, advertisements, artistic endeavors-all of these are ambit of expression.   Basically the First Amendment protects communication no matter what its nature or medium. Does this mean that our right to free speech is absolute?   An example that would coincide with this definition is the Gregory Johnson case that happened in Texas. In 1984, a man named Gregory Johnson stood outside of the Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas publicly burnt an American Flag. He was prosecuted under a Texas law prohibiting flag burning. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled that the Texas law was unconstitutional. There reasoning behind this ruling was the fact that it was a form of protest.  Ã‚     The opponents of the flag burning amendment have come to these definitions as a way to distinguish what a flag is and what it isnt. The Supreme Court has not specifically looked at the topic matter of symbolic speech.   The opponents of this amendment feel that just because the amendment states, Congress shall make no law doesnt make the statement is absolute.   The Supreme Court may restrict the freedom of speech just on the premise of what affect it (the act or expression) may have (Epstein Walker pg. 204). The protection of the first amendment according to Stephens and Scheb, the protection of the First Amendment is not limited to pure speech (444). Symbolic speech can be applied to a variety of nonverbal communication that is subject to First amendment protection (Stephens/Scheb 444). Throughout the sixties there were many nonverbal protests against the war. These were protected under the First amendment because of symbolic speech reasoning. An example of this is from the Supreme Court case Tinker V.   Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969).   This case is an example of this because of a black armband that was worn to school as a less defiant form of protest to the Vietnam War.  Ã‚   Another example of symbolic speech is the burning of a draft card. In the same year (1969) the Supreme Court focused on the verbal expression rather than symbolic speech.   Once again the definition and the interpretation of the First Amendment prove that this issue is difficult to solve. The proponents feel that it is a way to preserve the values that America stands for, but the opponents feel that this amendment will hinder their rights as citizens of America. Which side is right? I guess it is up to each of us (citizens of America) to decide what we feel is right and take a stand on this issue.  Ã‚  Ã‚   For further insight into this controversial topic I conducted a survey of fifty college students. The students ranged in age from 18 to 40. The students surveyed were from many different ethnic origins, and different backgrounds. The survey consisted of six questions that inquired about the publics views on the proposed Flag Burning Amendment. According to the survey, 65% of people polled said an amendment that makes burning a flag illegal is a violation of the First Amendment. Many of the responses had the same reasoning behind the answer, if that is what a person believes than it is protected. While 90% of those surveyed responded that they felt no sense of protection for the flag while saying the pledge of allegiance.   The results of the survey are interesting. It appears that most people oppose the proposed amendment. Which leads people right back to the beginning, what is the meaning of freedom of speech and what does our flag stand for?   The issue of flag burning will continue for a while, but in order to understand the issue one must take the time to really think about what they believe in and what they feel is right. It is only through action that we (humans) are able to change the ills of the world. If we change the world by protecting the flag or burning the flag we (citizens of the US) have the rights and freedoms to do such. America is about freedom and happiness; we should take a lesson from the past and try to strive for freedom and happiness, so that we can become a better nation.  Ã‚  Ã‚     

Capital Punishment Essay: Match Death with Death -- Argumentative Per

We Must Match Death with Death    For anyone living in Texas, it is common to hear about convicted criminals being sentenced to death. Is justice being served? When someone has committed a heinous murder, justice must prevail. But that ideal becomes harder to achieve as we scale the moral high ground and look all around, from behind the jail cell bars to the crushed life of the murdered victim. The following essay will focus on the proportionality of the death sentence as a form of punishment.       First of all, if there were no persons in the world, only things, there would be no values. There are values in the world only because there are persons: people who have not only desires , but also rationality and freedom. Something is valuable only relative to a human goal. Then, as the source of values, humans have dignity, which Immanuel Kant defines in his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals as something so valuable that nothing could transcend it in worth. It follows that to be human, to have dignity, one must value above all else those things which give you dignity. This means one must value absolutely the rationality, freedom, and autonomy of oneself, but also of other individuals. However; there are some crimes, some murders, committed with such violence and complete disregard for life, that we stop valuing the rationality, the freedom, and the autonomy of the murder so highly. The question is how much do we devalue the criminal?    Kant had some ideas about how to find out the proper level of punishment. First, guilt is a necessary condition for judicial punishment. That means that only the guilty may be punished. Second, guilt is a sufficient condition for punishment. All the guilty m... ...re severe than the death sentence, could a death sentence be an escape from a life sentence? However, if the goal were to give the most severe sentence wouldn't it be more accurate to find out what the criminal's idea of personal hell was? Severity is not the goal of punishment, rather retributivism and proportionality are. To give equal treatment to all, each person, guilty and not guilty, must be considered independently of utility, pity, and revenge. To accurately handle crime, the act and the actor must be understood. Once understood, a punishment ought to be meted out on the basis of whether or not it is proportional and appropriate to the crime at hand. Ultimately, the decision comes down to what a jury thinks is proportional. Because I think that there can be no other match than death for death, I believe that capital punishment is justified.      

Forrest Gump

Alma F. Florendo STUDENT NUMBER:   2009-5226 Fil-Canadian Training & Devt. Center for Caregivers- Makati Subject: Special Needs Instructor: Sir. JV Vergara Reaction Paper â€Å"Forrest Gump† Based on the 1986 novel of the same name by Winston Groom, Forrest Gump is a 1994 American comedy-drama film, starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright Penn,Gary Sinise, Mykelti Williamson, and Sally Field. It is a story of Forrest Gump’s epicjourney through life meeting historical figures, influencing popular culture, and experiencing first-hand historic events of the late 20th century while being largely unaware of their significance, due to his borderline mental retardation. The story started off with Forrest Gump, sitting at a bus stop in Savannah,Georgia, where a feather falls on him. When he picked up and put that feather on a book entitled Curious George, he then starts to tell his story to the woman sitting beside him. During the course of the story, the listeners at the bus stop change regularly where each shows different attitudes towards him, from disbelief and indifference. As the film that we had watched, we learned about his story from childhood to during his time after the war in Vietnam. There, we witnessed his struggles and the struggles of the people around him. First, there is his mother, who taught him many wonderful things and even had sex with the principal of the school just to let Forrest enter the school and be treated equally like any other normal students. During the first day of school Forrest met his very first friend, Jenny Curran, and became best friends with her. Despite having a below level intelligence quotient (IQ), Forrest develops an ability to run at great speed due to his running from bullies from school and this gets him to college through a football scholarship. After his college graduation, he got enlisted to the army and makes friends with a black man named Bubba, who talks nothing but shrimp and even convince Forrest to go into a shrimping business after the war. They were sent to Vietnam where he had saved many members of his platoon including his platoon leader during an ambush and where Bubba was killed in action. He was then awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroism. While on recovery from a gunshot wound on his buttocks, his discovers his uncanny ability for ping-pong and even gain popularity and later on competitively play against Chinese teams in ping pong diplomacy. He is subsequent promoted to sergeant and during an anti-war rally held in Washington, D. C. he reunites with Jenny, who has been living a hippie counterculture lifestyle. This is where the film ended and I can say that it has been enough to show us that the disability that Forrest Gump had can be compared to that of an innocent child who has been taught a simple life by his mother. The struggles that he had encountered, especially during the war in Vietnam, can be considered as a hard part of anyone’s life if they we’re on his shoes but Forrest did just wel l in war and did not even considered it as a big thing. There are many lessons that we can learn from his story, not just about how to treat people with disabilities or how they walk on a normal environment, but from the story of Forrest Gump, I had learned how lucky he is to be taught properly and greatly by his mother, on how he handles the people that we saw treating him improperly, and how he goes on with his life without even blaming other people or himself, that he had just accepted who he is and just like what his mother taught him, he is not different and is just like any other normal kids. If only normal people can be just like Forrest Gump, taking the struggles in life as a challenge and not as a problem, that everything that happens is according to God’s plan and that he has a reason for it, just imagine the wonderful things that can happen in one person’s life or even the influence that we can give to other people. Forrest Gump Alma F. Florendo STUDENT NUMBER:   2009-5226 Fil-Canadian Training & Devt. Center for Caregivers- Makati Subject: Special Needs Instructor: Sir. JV Vergara Reaction Paper â€Å"Forrest Gump† Based on the 1986 novel of the same name by Winston Groom, Forrest Gump is a 1994 American comedy-drama film, starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright Penn,Gary Sinise, Mykelti Williamson, and Sally Field. It is a story of Forrest Gump’s epicjourney through life meeting historical figures, influencing popular culture, and experiencing first-hand historic events of the late 20th century while being largely unaware of their significance, due to his borderline mental retardation. The story started off with Forrest Gump, sitting at a bus stop in Savannah,Georgia, where a feather falls on him. When he picked up and put that feather on a book entitled Curious George, he then starts to tell his story to the woman sitting beside him. During the course of the story, the listeners at the bus stop change regularly where each shows different attitudes towards him, from disbelief and indifference. As the film that we had watched, we learned about his story from childhood to during his time after the war in Vietnam. There, we witnessed his struggles and the struggles of the people around him. First, there is his mother, who taught him many wonderful things and even had sex with the principal of the school just to let Forrest enter the school and be treated equally like any other normal students. During the first day of school Forrest met his very first friend, Jenny Curran, and became best friends with her. Despite having a below level intelligence quotient (IQ), Forrest develops an ability to run at great speed due to his running from bullies from school and this gets him to college through a football scholarship. After his college graduation, he got enlisted to the army and makes friends with a black man named Bubba, who talks nothing but shrimp and even convince Forrest to go into a shrimping business after the war. They were sent to Vietnam where he had saved many members of his platoon including his platoon leader during an ambush and where Bubba was killed in action. He was then awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroism. While on recovery from a gunshot wound on his buttocks, his discovers his uncanny ability for ping-pong and even gain popularity and later on competitively play against Chinese teams in ping pong diplomacy. He is subsequent promoted to sergeant and during an anti-war rally held in Washington, D. C. he reunites with Jenny, who has been living a hippie counterculture lifestyle. This is where the film ended and I can say that it has been enough to show us that the disability that Forrest Gump had can be compared to that of an innocent child who has been taught a simple life by his mother. The struggles that he had encountered, especially during the war in Vietnam, can be considered as a hard part of anyone’s life if they we’re on his shoes but Forrest did just wel l in war and did not even considered it as a big thing. There are many lessons that we can learn from his story, not just about how to treat people with disabilities or how they walk on a normal environment, but from the story of Forrest Gump, I had learned how lucky he is to be taught properly and greatly by his mother, on how he handles the people that we saw treating him improperly, and how he goes on with his life without even blaming other people or himself, that he had just accepted who he is and just like what his mother taught him, he is not different and is just like any other normal kids. If only normal people can be just like Forrest Gump, taking the struggles in life as a challenge and not as a problem, that everything that happens is according to God’s plan and that he has a reason for it, just imagine the wonderful things that can happen in one person’s life or even the influence that we can give to other people. Forrest Gump Forrest Gump Alma F. Florendo STUDENT NUMBER:   2009-5226 Fil-Canadian Training & Devt. Center for Caregivers- Makati Subject: Special Needs Instructor: Sir. JV Vergara Reaction Paper â€Å"Forrest Gump† Based on the 1986 novel of the same name by Winston Groom, Forrest Gump is a 1994 American comedy-drama film, starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright Penn,Gary Sinise, Mykelti Williamson, and Sally Field. It is a story of Forrest Gump’s epicjourney through life meeting historical figures, influencing popular culture, and experiencing first-hand historic events of the late 20th century while being largely unaware of their significance, due to his borderline mental retardation. The story started off with Forrest Gump, sitting at a bus stop in Savannah,Georgia, where a feather falls on him. When he picked up and put that feather on a book entitled Curious George, he then starts to tell his story to the woman sitting beside him. During the course of the story, the listeners at the bus stop change regularly where each shows different attitudes towards him, from disbelief and indifference. As the film that we had watched, we learned about his story from childhood to during his time after the war in Vietnam. There, we witnessed his struggles and the struggles of the people around him. First, there is his mother, who taught him many wonderful things and even had sex with the principal of the school just to let Forrest enter the school and be treated equally like any other normal students. During the first day of school Forrest met his very first friend, Jenny Curran, and became best friends with her. Despite having a below level intelligence quotient (IQ), Forrest develops an ability to run at great speed due to his running from bullies from school and this gets him to college through a football scholarship. After his college graduation, he got enlisted to the army and makes friends with a black man named Bubba, who talks nothing but shrimp and even convince Forrest to go into a shrimping business after the war. They were sent to Vietnam where he had saved many members of his platoon including his platoon leader during an ambush and where Bubba was killed in action. He was then awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroism. While on recovery from a gunshot wound on his buttocks, his discovers his uncanny ability for ping-pong and even gain popularity and later on competitively play against Chinese teams in ping pong diplomacy. He is subsequent promoted to sergeant and during an anti-war rally held in Washington, D. C. he reunites with Jenny, who has been living a hippie counterculture lifestyle. This is where the film ended and I can say that it has been enough to show us that the disability that Forrest Gump had can be compared to that of an innocent child who has been taught a simple life by his mother. The struggles that he had encountered, especially during the war in Vietnam, can be considered as a hard part of anyone’s life if they we’re on his shoes but Forrest did just wel l in war and did not even considered it as a big thing. There are many lessons that we can learn from his story, not just about how to treat people with disabilities or how they walk on a normal environment, but from the story of Forrest Gump, I had learned how lucky he is to be taught properly and greatly by his mother, on how he handles the people that we saw treating him improperly, and how he goes on with his life without even blaming other people or himself, that he had just accepted who he is and just like what his mother taught him, he is not different and is just like any other normal kids. If only normal people can be just like Forrest Gump, taking the struggles in life as a challenge and not as a problem, that everything that happens is according to God’s plan and that he has a reason for it, just imagine the wonderful things that can happen in one person’s life or even the influence that we can give to other people. Forrest Gump

Wages For The American Worker Essay - 2526 Words

Honest Wages for The American Worker Congratulations, you are hired! The four words that people long to hear. However, for many newly employed workers, their new job will not pay an income that will enable them to live comfortably. In 2015, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 2.6 million Americans, or approximately 3.3 percent of all hourly paid workers earned wages at, or below the federal minimum wage. Since 2009, the federal minimum wage amount has remained stagnant. Bringing this number to a level that is consistent with the cost of living is a basic right for every wage earning American. Raising the minimum wage enables working people to live above the poverty line. Although opposition states that raising the wage will increase unemployment, the increase would actually reduce the number of persons receiving food stamps, stimulate the economy, in addition to reducing income inequality. According to a Washington Post-ABC news poll, two-thirds of Americans say the minimum wage should be increased. In 2015, protests by low wage workers garnered media attention and captured the nation’s attention. Workers exposed the low wage paying practices by several big-name corporations. These companies included Macy’s, Sears and Walmart in addition to fast-food outlets Dunkin Donuts, McDonald’s and Subway. Pressure is building on Congress to raise the amount, nevertheless this is not the first time Congress has wrestled with this subject. The Fair Labor Standards Act was aShow MoreRelatedThe Minimum Wage Must Benefit Millions Of American Workers989 Words   |  4 Pagescent minimum wage, and a 40 hour work week for many professions, but nowadays, the minimum wage has fallen well behind the cost of living and fallen behind inflation. 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