The court will decide if cross burning is constitutionally protected free speech or if it's threatening speech that can be outlawed.

        Meanwhile, I'll be deciding whether to buy a personal firetruck, in case I encounter some of this so-called speech and decide to make a watery commentary on it.

        The high court is putting to test a Virginia law enacted 50 years ago that makes it a felony to burn a cross on someone else's property, a highway or other public place with the intent to intimidate.

        The court will consider two Virginia cases about cross-burnings that could be anywhere.

        In one, an interracial Virginia Beach couple found a burning cross in their yard in May 1998. A white neighbor and his friend were sentenced to 90 days in jail and fined $2,500.

        In the other, Ku Klux Klan ralliers in August 1998 set fire to a 30-foot cross on a private farm field, atop a hill where it could be seen by passersby. An imperial wizard was fined $2,500.

        Virginia's Supreme Court threw out both convictions in November, saying that an earlier U.S. Supreme Court ruling makes Virginia's law unconstitutional. It was too broad, the court said, and invalidly outlaws speech based on content, a First Amendment no-no.

        Cross burning, it said, is “symbolic speech” that enjoys broad protection.

        Dissenting justices said the First Amendment does not protect speech that threatens bodily harm, so-called fighting words, whether symbolic or not.
       

Lots of legal, offensive speech

        Being a veteran journalist, I'm a staunch advocate of the First Amendment. At least in spirit, I support allowing raunchy magazines their right to print, sex shops their right to sell sex toys, and anti-abortionists their right to offend us with those up-close photos of aborted fetuses.

        I understand the Supreme Court's ruling upholding protesters' right to burn American flags, and I even grudgingly accept legal limits on Cincinnati's efforts to keep the KKK out of downtown.

        So, I shrug off my neighbors' Confederate flag flying and their darkly painted lawn jockeys. They have a right to display their lack of taste or sensitivity.

        But burning a cross is a different sort of message. Others much smarter than I believe that cross burning is shorthand for “We, generic, superior-feeling whites, want you, generic member of a minority group, to feel frightened enough to clear out of our neighborhood or town. If you don't, there will be trouble.”

        Historically, cross burnings have been followed by lynchings and beatings.

Tristate cross burnings

        Two years ago, an interracial couple in Middletown found a burning cross and racially offensive posters outside their home. In 1999 a cross burned in a Price Hill park. In 1998, a man admitted he burned a cross to intimidate a Newtonsville interracial couple. The year before, someone tried to light crosses in Wilberforce, Ohio, and in Covington.

        Cross burning should be among the other kinds of speech left outside the First Amendment — along with child pornography, obscenity, yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, and certain forms of libel.

        Federal courts have long upheld that hanging a noose constitutes a hostile workplace for blacks.

        Burning a cross is no different.

        As Jerry Kilgore, Virginia's state attorney general, put it: “Burning a cross to intimidate someone is nothing short of domestic terrorism.”

       Call Denise Smith Amos at 768-8395, or e-mail damos@enquirer.com.

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