Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser on Monday ordered 51-star American flags to be displayed along Pennsylvania Avenue ahead of Flag Day, June 14.
If individual American citizens, or groups of them, want to fly an altered American flag, that’s fine. I disagree with the sentiment behind the flying, but it’s an American citizen’s right to do so.
It’s particularly despicable when a government official gives that order and aims it at a day like yesterday—Flag Day, which honors the adoption, by the Second Continental Congress, of our United States flag on June 14, 1777, not quite a year after our Declaration of our independence from a prior overweening, monarchical Government.
Worse, it’s outright dangerous when a government official—at any level of the American republican democracy hierarchy—orders an altered, and so un-American, flag to be flown. That’s more than a bridge too far. That’s a point at which the official badly and promptly needs to be removed from office for her violation of her oath of office.