‘F--- Biden’ flag justly offends Overland Park residents. It’s legal. But is it right?
A “F--- Biden” flag flying outside an Overland Park home has understandably incensed area residents. And while the city rightly says it’s protected speech under the First Amendment, such displays only further the alarming demise of civil dialogue in America.
An anonymous group calling itself the “Resident Collective of Overland Park” filed a complaint on the city’s OP Cares website about the flag, which also says “and f--- you for voting for him.” In a message shared with city council members, city staff wrote that “Community Services investigated the issue and found that it was located on private property and within the parameters of the homeowner’s First Amendment rights.”
The city is absolutely right. Even such a profane political statement is free speech under the Constitution. Indeed, the ACLU of Kansas — hardly a right-wing organization — defended a Blue Rapids man’s right to fly a similar anti-Biden flag. He was charged last August with promoting obscenity, but the ACLU announced last month the charge was dismissed.
“The First Amendment protects us all from government overregulation of speech, regardless of our age, race, gender or political viewpoint,” ACLU of Kansas’ legal director Sharon Brett wrote in an email to us. “ACLU of Kansas is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to upholding the civil rights and liberties of all Kansans, and laws like the one in Blue Rapids, Kansas, clearly criminalize core political speech in violation of the First Amendment.”
A Munford, Tennessee, mayor last summer made the same calculation, and a few headlines, when he also determined a “F--- Biden” flag is “vile. It’s vulgar. It’s protected speech under the Constitution.”
Overland Park City Councilman Paul Lyons reluctantly accepts the city’s legal conclusion, but adds, “The fact that it may be his legal right to do that doesn’t make it right.”
And that’s the thing. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Such publicly viewable indecency is corrosive to the body politic and toxic to the health of a republic, or any other civilized society. Donald Trump certainly didn’t help with repeated profanity at his campaign rallies. Likewise, Trump critic Robert DeNiro’s nationally televised epithet “F--- Trump” on stage at the 2018 Tony Awards was equally inexcusable, as was the sick standing ovation that followed.
Nor does such foulness further anyone’s favorite cause, on either side of the political divide. “Clearly he strongly believes in his point of view,” Lyons says of the OP flag flier, “but he doesn’t understand that doing this doesn’t get anybody on his side.”
And have you ever noticed that the more profanity is used, the less impact it has? Repeated and combative cursing says infinitely more about the speaker than the subject.
Lyons points sadly to the quaint standards we once clung to in this country, as exhibited by Amazon’s 2021 movie “Being the Ricardos,” about the backstage squabbles of the “I Love Lucy” television show. One such brouhaha: whether Lucy could be shown as, or even referred to as, being pregnant. We’ve come a long way since then, in many good ways but also in many bad. The forced new tolerance of barroom bawdiness is one of the bad.
The only solution for legally protected crassness in a self-governed country is, well, true self-governance — the kind of self-restraint our form of government depends upon for its very survival.
The same kind that is in such short supply today.
