id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
blj-2304	Granahan, Jack	“Decisions We Do Not Like”: Flag Desecration Case Law and the Culture War	2024	19	.pdf	application/pdf	5205	235	56	On the day of the law’s codification into federal law, Gregory Lee Johnson and seven others burned American flags in protest of the law in Washington, D.C. and Seattle, Washington.609 All eight were charged with violating the 1989 law, though charges against Johnson were dropped after witness testimony confirmed that his flag had not ignited.610 Just as supporters and opponents of the Flag Protection Act had planned, the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, with the case being submitted as United States v. Eichman (Johnson’s fellow activist, Shawn Eichman, was listed as the primary appellee).611 After almost a year of the public relations firestorm that had resulted from the Johnson decision, it certainly would not have been surprising for any of the five justices who had voted with the majority—especially a conservative justice who had only tentatively sided with Johnson—to change their mind on the flag desecration issue. The First Amendment’s protection of flag desecration as a form of symbolic speech was one of the most divisive issues in American politics, and it comprised a major facet of the cultural conflict between liberals and conservatives.542 Although the Supreme Court issued several conservative rulings on cultural issues at this time, the decisions of Texas v. Johnson (1989) and United States v. Eichman (1990) did not follow this trend.	cache/blj-2304.pdf	txt/blj-2304.txt