“Over the years, upside-down flags have been displayed by both the right and the left as an outcry over a range of issues, including the Vietnam War, gun violence, the Supreme Court’s overturning of the constitutional right to abortion and, in particular, election results. In 2012, Tea Party followers inverted flags at their homes to signal disgust at the re-election of President Barack Obama. Four years later, some liberals advised doing the same after Mr. Trump was elected.” —Jodi Kantor, The New York Times
Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. had an upside-down US flag waving over his house following the 2020 election. The flag in this position signals distress. It has been rebranded by The New York Times as a “Stop the Steal” symbol. Alito said that it was his wife, not him, who raised the distress symbol. “I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Alito said in an emailed statement to the NYTimes. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”
Progressives are countering that even if Alito didn’t raise it, he kept it flying. “It might be his spouse or someone else living in his home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia (to get a sense of her politics, here’s Frost’s profile page at the university). This is “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard,” she said, “which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases.”
So are progressives really saying that Alito—a man sworn to defend the Constitution—should censor his wife’s speech? Are these the same progressives who lost their minds over Harrison Butker’s graduation address at Benedictine, a private catholic college in Atchison, Kansas? This is a serious question: are feminists now good with husbands censoring the speech of their wives? Speaking as a feminist myself, I’m not good with that at all. Mrs. Alito has a right to fly any flag she wishes over her house.
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Speaking of Harrison Butker, the Kansas City Chiefs kicker, I listened to his speech yesterday. I got curious because the speech was being described as demeaning towards women and the LGBTQ+ community and inappropriate for a graduation. Inappropriate at a Catholic university? A petition for Butker’s dismissal from the Chiefs has nearly reached its goal of 150,000 signatures. Here is a video of his speech if you’re interested in listening to it:
After listening to the whole thing, I am at a loss to understand what is so objectionable? I don’t agree with some of his opinions, but none are outrageous. They are consistent with his religious teachings—which he has a right to—and mild compared to the preachments of Islamic clerics. There are things he said that I do agree with. The things he said about the rile of fathers, for example (Kansas City residents should take those sentiments to heart). He impressed me; he is an accomplished public speaker and, what is more, I learned a lot about a worldview that is different from mine, namely the Latin Mass. I appreciate men rising and expressing their opinions in an honest and direct way.
It did not surprise anyone, I think, when the NFL condemned the speech. “Harrison Butker gave a speech in his personal capacity. His views are not those of the NFL as an organization,” said Senior Vice President Jonathan Beane, the league’s chief diversity and inclusion officer. (Nice, they assigned their DEI man to articulate the criticism.) “The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger.” Why does the NFL articulate positions on such matters? The NFL is an impersonal corporation. Shouldn’t it be an apolitical organization?
However, it did surprise many when Whoopi Goldberg came to his defense. Speaking on her show, The View, she said, “I like when people say what they need to say—he’s at a Catholic College, he’s a staunch Catholic, these are his beliefs, and he’s welcome to them. I don’t have to believe them, right? I don’t have to accept them. The ladies that were sitting in that audience do not have to accept them.” (Apparently the ladies in the audience liked them just fine, if the enthusiastic applause throughout the speech was any indication.) “I have the right to say what I say, he has the right to say what he says.” Goldberg continued. “When you say to somebody, ‘I don’t like what you said and I’m going to get your job taken away because you disagree with me,’ for me, that is an issue.” Of course, she had to twist the thing into a rant about how Trump is all about taking away the rights of everybody and we don’t want to be that way. Of course we don’t. Neither does Trump.
She ran into another issue when she compared the situation to Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49er who sat during the national anthem to protest what he described as oppression against black people. Goldberg said “The same way we want respect when Colin Kaepernick takes a knee, we want to give respect to people whose ideas are different from ours.” Kaepernick was on the job when he did this. Butker was giving a speech at a private university. While I think free speech rights should be upheld everywhere, the current interpretation of the First Amendment permits private corporations to censor speech and discipline those who speech the corporation finds objectionable. But that’s beside the point, some will argue. Kaepernick was let go not because of his protests but because he was no longer a competitive player in the NFL.
freedom and reason 