While placing a confederate flag on the grounds of Martin Luther King’s Atlanta church is a “dispicable act by cowards,” says Gary Stein in the Sun Sentinel, July 31, 2015, it is still an act protected by the First Amendment. It would be sufficient just to publish the names of those responsible.
In July a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, argued in Salon that displaying the confederate flag should be a hate crime but days later recanted quoting Frederick Douglass, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.” But says Professor Nick Bromell those who claim the flag is an innocent representation of the good things about the South are ignoring the history of racial oppression beginning with slavery. (Salon, July 14, 2015, by Nick Bromell)
Jazz Shaw in Hot Air, July 31, 2015, comments on the call for the FBI to treat the confederate flag planting in Atlanta as a federal hate crime, “The essence of the First Amendment in this country relies on the fact that we have to protect the right to unpopular thoughts, speech and other forms of expression which don’t cause direct harm to others.”