Editor’s note: This commentary is by Patrick Cashman, who is originally from Barre Town and currently resides in Portland, Oregon.
[D]eb Markowitz’s commentary regarding the organizational flag being flown over Montpelier High School can be taken in many ways. While I am sure it was provided as a sincere testimony of her faith, it can also be taken as a sanctimonious attempt to impose her beliefs on others. Her piece implies that if a reader is sufficiently educated and enlightened, and not a bumpkin, the reader will immediately identify and concur with her beliefs. And in the inverse that if one doesn’t share her faith then it must be due to base and ignorant motives, not carefully reasoned and logical objections.
So let’s remove the actual content, intended or accidental, from what is being attempted at Montpelier High School. A flag that is not the national ensign or state flag is being flown on a public flagpole at a public school. That flag represents a specific organization, and is claimed to also represent a body of ideas. What those ideas are vary considerably depending upon who the viewer is and what their experience with those ideas and its proponents has been in the past. By allowing that flag to be flown on that public flagpole in that public space, the Montpelier school board is explicitly providing a government endorsement of that group and some version of the ideas that group represents. This is not only an unfortunate precedent, but absolutely wrong.
Speech and belief are unavoidably entwined in our country. You cannot proscribe speech based on belief alone, nor can our common government compel support of particular beliefs. Such belief-policing is the work of an individual’s conscience, not the government. “For at the heart of the First Amendment is the notion that an individual should be free to believe as he will, and that in a free society one’s beliefs should be shaped by his mind and his conscience rather than coerced by the State.” (D. Louis Abood et al., v. Detroit Bd. of Ed. 431 U.S. 209), or if you prefer; “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” (West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624). Our hearts and minds can be subject to persuasion, but are supposed to be exempt from government regulation or coercion.
Unfortunately, now the Montpelier School Board has established the precedent that the high school flag pole is an open venue for the display of corporate logos and the promotion of majority-approved ideologies. That this was a unanimous vote of that board is irrelevant. No matter how earnestly they believe in their views, that doesn’t empower the majority to vote to annul the constitutional protections of the minority or the individual. In this vote they have not only violated their oath of allegiance; “I ____ do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will be true and faithful to the State of Vermont, and that I will not, directly or indirectly, do any act or thing injurious to the Constitution or Government thereof.” Through this indefensible decision they have also placed their entire community at significant risk of legal action, and perhaps that is for the best. Hardship and travails are the best teachers, and in this case the Montpelier school board has shown themselves to be in need of some constitutional education.
