An Iowa man named Homer Martz was arrested, charged, and briefly jailed for allegedly desecrating the America flag, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a month in jail, after he hung it upside down under a Chinese flag as a protest.
He says he didn't realize hanging the flag upside down was illegal, particularly on his own land. "If they had asked me to take [the flags] down, and showed me the statute, I would have taken them down," Martz explained, "but in my book, they trespassed by taking the flags down." Underneath the flags, to make the protest clear, he had placed a sign reading, "In China there is no freedom, no protesting, no due process. In Iowa? In America?"
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