Reader Ann Paige of Out in Asheville tipped me off on this outrage going on out in the western part of North Carolina:
Pam…..check this out….happened right up the street from me and my partner. The folks had a upside down flag on their porch with “OUT NOW” along with a pic of GW pinned to the flag. Well, Buncombe County deputies ended up arresting them for…..well….you got to check this out.From the Asheville Citizen-Times:
Mark and Deborah Kuhn were arrested on two counts of assault on a government employee, resisting arrest and a rarely used charge, desecrating an American flag, all misdemeanors. The Kuhns were released from custody Wednesday afternoon.Here’s the photo. If you read the rest of the article, it was a real fracas — basically a fight breaking out and charges that the deputy assaulted the Kuhns. The newpaper’s web site has the 911 call and other audio interviews with those involved.“This is surreal,” Deborah Kuhn, 52, said moments after her son Mark Stidham paid $1,500 bond to get the couple out of jail.
Arrest reports show Buncombe County Sheriff’s deputy Brian Scarborough went to the Kuhns’ home on 68 Brevard Road about 8:45 a.m. Wednesday to investigate a complaint of an American flag on display after being desecrated.
State law prohibits anyone from knowingly mutilating, defiling, defacing or trampling the U.S. or North Carolina flags. Lt. Randy Sorrells of the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office said the Kuhns desecrated the flag by pinning signs to it, not by flying it upside down.
An upside-down flag typically is flown as a distress signal. The Kuhns said they flew it this way not out of disrespect but to symbolize the state of the country.
Deborah Kuhn said the signs pinned to the flag included an explanation on the meaning of an upside-down flag and asked to “help our country.” One of the signs was a photo of President Bush with “Out Now” written on it, they said.
…Mark Kuhn, who said he had flown his flag upside down before without any problems, said he plans to fight the charges. The Kuhns each face a maximum 420 days in jail if convicted on all of the charges.
“We are going to do our best to get a civil liberties lawyer from the ACLU,” Kuhn said.
32 Responses to “Asheville, NC: alleged flag desecration results in fight and arrests”
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Aaaaah, yes. “Assaulting police”. That great, most-loved, most cherished charge of thuggish and stupid policemen when faced with ANY ANY ANY physical contact between themselves and a person insistent on their civil rights.
About as difficult to predict as the sun coming up in the east.
is this story also posted below?
I see by the photo that the Kuhns are Ron Paul supporters. Yay Ron!
Without knowing all the facts, I’m not sure an arrest was called for. The flag may be flown upside down as a distress signal, but it should not serve as a prop expressing a political point.
If the Kuhns feel that they are in distress, by all means fly the flag upside down. If they feel that George Bush is the cause of the distress, they could post a sign near the flag saying so. Pinning the picture of Bush and the signs to flag amount to desecration.
OMG, desecrating the flag! How will our democracy survive people expressing opposition to its current course with stuff pinned to cloth. How’s this arrest even constitutional?
Direwolf, you are perfectly welcome to the opinion that the flag ’should’ not be desecrated. You can think the Kuhns are jerks for doing it. You can write them a letter saying so, if you so desire. I don’t think that the Yankees should have signed Roger Clemens, for example.
You can even come up with a bunch of rules about how the flag should be treated (they do exist, anyway) and recommend them to people.
If you think the law has any business in this, then fuck off.
LesterHunt (and Kuhn family), why are you supporting Ron Paul? I find it particularly troubling that the Kuhns would support a candidate who has such a spotty record on the civil liberties they want to enjoy.
He voted against the Voting Rights Act, he is deeply anti-choice, and he opposes gay marriage. To him, the occupation of Iraq is no different then sending in peace-keeping troops to Darfur. Starting a genocide? Stopping a genocide? No difference.
Let me make this clear for you: Ron Paul will only let you have your civil liberties if you are a straight, white male. And if you are a straight white male and you don’t think there’s anything wrong with such an embargo on rights for the “everyone else” in society, you need to have your head examined, because you’re not only a crappy “libertarian,” you’re a crappy human being.
I find the way Direwolf is thinking interesting…”it should not serve as a prop expressing a political point.”…Ok then. On that basis we can pretty much run in the entire Republican party for misusing the flag, as well as all those car dealers. After all, every one of them uses intentionally distorted (desecrated) images of the flag to make a point or to sell something.
Or does it only matter when we disagree with the point?
What the hey? I can’t see any of the comments. The whole page is just a big empty space.
The charge of flag desecration is of course dead on arrival. In Maryland - don’t know about North Carolina - one has an absolute right to resist an unlawful arrest and in MD, at least, non-lethal force is a legitimate method of resisting non-lethal illegal force, such as an illegal arrest.
Whether any of this is the same in NC remains to be seen. If this occurred in MD, I would LOVE to be their attorney….
It’s weird. This happened in North Carolina, the Kuhns are white and they’re not gay. They support the conservative’s conservative: Ron Paul.
But they still got in trouble.
Fine. When can we expect to see the arrests of the restaurant/car dealership owners who fly tattered flags, unlit flags at night, and or flags in the rain? Or the confiscation of newspapers with flags printed on them as logos? And of clothes with the American flag on them?
Those are all improper displays and desecrations. Funny how the only “desecration” that might have a legitimate chance at being politically motivated and therefore Constitutionally-protected free expression is the one that resulted in arrest.
Apparently Pastor Niemoller’s prayer is still in effect.
That wasn’t Niemoller’s prayer, it was his lament. For some other pastors of his generation, it was their epitaph.
What’s bizarre here is that political-speech modifications of the flag are exactly and absolutely what the Supreme Court has said the constitution protects. All of the car dealers and clothing manufacturers and presidents who sign autographs on Old Glory are protected from prosecution only as a byproduct of the protection of political speech (because the government doesn’t get decide — or at least didn’t until recently — what constitutes legitimate political speech).
Wait for the court decision that although the political use of flags has been repeatedly declared legal for almost 40 years, the officers who did the arresting had a good-faith belief that the law they were enforcing was valid, so that neither they nor their employer should get in any trouble.
It’s almost enough to make me want to go out and buy a flag and burn it….
Unfortunately, your probably right, but HOW?! Doesn’t every person know that flag desacration laws are blatantly unconstitutional? Cripes, how many times do we have to go through this shit? How stupid are these cops?
Unfortunately, Jeff, there’s a huge distance between knowing a law or an order is illegal, unconstitutional, or unenforceable, and having the stones to stand up, look the LT straight in the eye, and say “No, Sir, That order is illegal and I will not obey it.”
And if you’ve got dependents, that distance increases by orders of magnitude, because you’ll be job hunting and probably blackballed by quitting time (assuming that in today’s world you’re not simply desaparecido…)
The comments at the Citizen-Times website are painful to read. They’ve been freeped to death, but they’re also yet another venue for the ‘libruls and hippys and gheys ruined asheville, i was born here and i liked it back when it was a shithole’ types.
The backstory: Brevard Road is near the National Guard armory, and it appears that a Freeperish NG type called up his buddy the county deputy to do a bit of freelance po-licing, even though the address is within the city limits.
They won’t end up charged with that, I’d guess. Too easy to wave the Supreme Court precedent. Also, I half-expect the newly-elected sheriff might not want this taken to court on the assault charges, because NC doesn’t have a must-show-ID law unless you’re being arrested, and all the non-cop witnesses — there were six police cruisers eventually at the home — say that the deputy kicked in the door-glass.
Two people slammed with the bogus charge of “flag desecration” for flying the thing upside down with the picture of a sitting president tacked to it? Hmmm….where have I heard about this before?
OH YEAH! I know of a certain hate group that does the same thing, except that most liberals are loathe to defend them, whereas the Kuhns – their support for Ron Paul notwithstanding – will be lionized as martyrs for free speech.
In closing, I would like to remind everyone here that any law which cuts one way can also cut the other.
Your honors, I rest my fucking case.
If they get charged with flag desecration, the authorities will be plainly liable under section 1983. There is an exception to sovereign immunity for enforcement of a statute that any competent law enforcement official would know to be unconstitutional. I would say a binding supreme court precedent directly holding that no state may criminalize flag desecration a la Texas v. Johnson is pretty fucking adequate notice.
But of course, that’s just an obscure precedent, no one’s ever heard of the flag desecration debate
Yeah, The Devil’s Advocate, you saw a lot of people arguing for “rights for me but not for thee” here. I didn’t though, perhaps you could quote them for me. I am clearly too stupid to understand the nuance of your argument. Unless your argument is: people here all believe the same thing, and dislike groups that promote hatred, therefore all of the above posts which I didn’t bother to read lionize the Kuhns for their flag desecration but state that any group the homogeneous we disapprove of has no right to do so. If that was your argument, and I caught the drift of it correctly, you’ve got more teeth than brain cells.
Defacing like this? (You’re welcome to use the image, btw.)
Cool, are they going to start going after all those people with the flag sticks on their cars?
I’d think that going through a tattered/torn American flag about once a month because driving just destroys those flags would be considered knowingly mutilating or defacing the flag.
The flag may be flown upside down as a distress signal, but it should not serve as a prop expressing a political point.
I see. So all the politicians wearing American flag lapel pins ought to be arrested?
The whole purpose of the Amercan flag is that it expresses a political point, although not always a partisan one. It was to express a political point that Amerian soliders raised the flag over Ft. McHenry . . .
To get around fascist flag laws, just make a flag with 11 stripes and 55 stars.
If that’s accurate, the Kuhns’ lawyer should be sending a letter to the local FBI office, asking them to investigate the violation of 18USC, Section 242, which prohibits use of ostensible law-enforcement powers to prevent people from exercising their civil rights or punish them for doing so. If a weapon is involved (armed deputy) that’s 10 years in the Federal pen.
I know serious prosecution is probably unlikely under the current justice department, but the FBI tells citizens that they should report such crimes when they hear of them.
A flag is a symbol and thus should be left to the symbol-minded.
Or anywhere else with any other law enforcement agency, federal, state or municipal. Read Radley Balko’s ” new professionalism”* stories in The Agitator if you really want to be depressed about it.* - The title is a nod to Justice Scalia’s opinion in the no-knock cases which said, in effect, Americans really don’t constitutional protections (ie: the exclusionary rule) any more because police departments are so well-trained and professional now.
By definition, one cannot desecrate an object that is not sacred. As we have constitutionally protected separation of church and state, the flag is not a sacred object, and thus cannot be “desecrated.” It can be disrespected but, so far, disrespect is not criminally punishable (except as a contempt of court charge).
I would find it emotionally disturbing, even upsetting, to burn a flag. Even to desecrate one. Flags on pizza boxes and on large stickers, or flag cross-stitch pillow patterns or underwear I find humorous, and also tasteless, but I could never imagine myself supporting fines or jail time for someone who would choose to desecrate or burn a flag. To me, it’s one of those tasteless freedoms we have to have as a country to ensure that freedom of speech isn’t limited to whatever is comfortably political.
Another culture gap, it seems. While most Australians will get reasonably enthused about our country’s flag *as a symbol of our country*, we’re not likely to take this enthusiasm to the extent that we’re going to get narked about someone using it as a political prop. Then again, we don’t seem to have the same sort of hyper-patriotic environment as the US (despite the efforts of our current Prime Minister in such a direction), which means home flagpoles aren’t exactly a regular feature. A controversy about the Australian flag is more likely to be related to the periodic attempts to redesign the thing than it is to what someone’s done with it.
Actually, the last controversial flag-usage related incident I can think of in the Australian political scene was when Cathy Freeman did a victory lap at one of the Commonwealth games, carrying both an Australian flag, and the Indigenous Australian flag, and even that controversy mainly came out of the reactions of some of the more conservative members of the Australian Commonwealth Games committee.
I tried to leave this yesterday but was having trouble with the site.
This is an Asheville music discussion board but in this case the commentor posted the Kuhn’s neighbor’s description of events…
I heard Ms. Kuhn on the radio this past Friday night, on the Jon Elliott show (AAR). She stated that the whole thing started with a guy in an Army Reserve uniform coming to their door to complain about the flag. They explained what-n-why, and he left. Then the drive-bys started, people in Army uniforms driving slowly by their house, some takign pictures.
Then the deputy arrived. Contrary to the official report (says Ms. Kuhn), he did NOT attempt to give them a citation, and AFTER they took the flag down he asked them for ID, but they asked him why he wanted it, and then they went back into their house. The deputy then began pounding on their door, and broke in the window with his bare hand to open the door. He then began chasing Mr. Kuhn through the house, back out the front door, and around their car. Ms. Kuhn called 911 to report that the deputy had broken into their house and was assaulting him. Mr. Kuhn surrendered when he was threatened with a TASERing. Ms. Kuhn was also threatened with a TASER.
It’s worth noting that the Kuhns have witnesses to their version of what happened, and that the neighbors who tried to intervene, asked why the Kuhns were being arrested, were told it wasn’t any of their business. (Unlike a lot of places, the neighbors said it was their business, because the Kuhns were their neighbors.) Also, Ms. Kuhn said that the deputy was a recently-returned Iraqi-war vet, and that the tactics he used on them were the same ones they use in Baghdad for search-and-seizures.
The official police report is so far opposite from the Kuhn’s account that it’s easy to say the Kuhns are the same as anyone saying “I’m innocent, I tell ya!” except, well, THEY HAVE WITNESSES. And they were just hanging a friggin’ flag upside down, not molesting kids!
I have a problem with the whole “flag desecration” argument anyway. “Desecration” means “to make unsacred by defilement.” Since when is the American Frikkin’ Flag a holy object, anyway? Isn’t that idolatry? Isn’t that breaking one of the Ten Commandments? And why aren’t the fundies complaining about “sacred flags,” instead of “desecrating” said flags, in the first place???