All of them doing the same thing, physically, on the flag.” If it portrays people kneeling and praying to God, probably not for sure. If it’s heterosexual activity, maybe not. “Well, if it’s homosexual activity, we may have banned it. Does anyone in here doubt that the next day there wouldn’t be someone here with a statute saying it is, by definition, desecration of the flag to portray it in a circumstance where homosexual activity is being performed upon the flag? Or heterosexual activity. Would that be desecrating the flag under this amendment? Let me ask you, does anyone doubt that there might not be at least a few members of this body that would introduce an amendment to the law? We can amend this 99 times, once we pass the constitutional amendment, we can pass any law we want. I ask you, assume that there were a painting or a photograph taken of homosexuals engaging in a sexual act on a flag.īiden argued a constitutional amendment would be the gateway to regulating expression. We went through a whole exercise here with Mapplethorpe’s paintings and the National Endowment for the Arts, and they related to paintings – photographs that had to do with homosexual activity.
“Parts of the American public occasionally responding to the emotions of the moment occasionally, occasionally, they pass laws that don’t make sense in the wide scope of things,” Biden said on the Senate floor on June 25, 1990.