WFAY-AM, broadcasting out of Fayetteville, NC, normally carries East Carolina University football games.  No more, at least for a while.

WFAY-AM in Fayetteville announced Tuesday that it would not carry the Pirates’ game at South Florida scheduled for Saturday. The move comes after the school said 19 band members kneeled during the anthem before the game against Central Florida….

Of course, the band members have a free speech right to protest and to disrespect our flag and our national anthem in the course of that protest.

But—and this is a point too many on the Left choose to ignore—the rest of us have the same free speech right to protest the protest and/or its technique, and to take action in counter to that protest.

Good for WFAY, and good for the station’s sponsors, who agreed with the decision.

Do high school football fans have a constitutional right to display the American flag at games?

That question headlined Jacob Gershman’s piece in a recent Wall Street Journal law blog.  A North Carolina high school principal, Travelers Rest High School’s Lou Lavely, answered that question in the negative, justifying his ban of the American flag from the school’s home football games with the excuse that students had

used the US flag, in conjunction with verbal taunts, to target Hispanic members of the Berea community in a manner that was both unsportsmanlike and also a misuse of our flag[.]

Lavely’s move also was consistent with an earlier 9^th Circuit ruling on the other side of the country that

a California high school didn’t infringe on the constitutional rights of white students who were told they couldn’t wear shirts displaying the American flag in an effort, the school said, to defuse a potential fight with Mexican students

a ruling that the Supreme Court then declined to review.

In the face of public outrage over the flag ban, Lavely reversed his position and “allowed” our flag to be displayed after all.  However, that doesn’t cure the misunderstanding, both by Lavely and our courts, underlying such bans of our flag or of shirts with our flag imprinted on them or of any other such display.

The misunderstanding is in the cause of disruptions and how to deal with those disruptions.

Banning the American flag because its display might cause disruption is wrong-headed.  The American flag, or displaying our flag—free speech generally—doesn’t cause disruptions.  The disrupters cause disruptions, and they’re the ones who need to be dealt with.

Full stop.

Update: Clarified a sentence to say what I actually meant rather than the opposite.  Also clarified a later paragraph.