An Iowa man was arrested and jailed for hanging an American flag upside down

An Occupy DC protester holds an American flag upside down

(Image credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

published 14 August 2016

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?"

Martz is angry because a planned oil pipeline will run between his land and his well, which is located on a neighbor's property but is legally his. He was told the pipeline wouldn't touch his land but not that it would infringe on his water access and make his water pipe more vulnerable to freezing. The pipeline route was planned using eminent domain, and neither Martz nor the neighbor who owns the land in question volunteered their property for the oil route.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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