Poll: Half of Republicans say you should lose your citizenship if you desecrate the flag

(Image credit: Tom Pennington/Getty Images)

published 10 October 2017

Seven in 10 Republicans are in favor of making it illegal to burn or otherwise desecrate the American flag, finds a new YouGov/Cato Institute poll previewed by Reason on Tuesday. Half say you should lose your citizenship if you do the desecrating, an idea President Trump suggested in 2016.

The survey also probed American attitudes on First Amendment rights more broadly. About one-third of Republican respondents said they backed a ban on offensive public statements about police and the military, and half of Democrats similarly agreed the "government should prevent people from engaging in hate speech against certain groups in public." Slightly more than half (53 percent) of Democrats also said that to defend racists' free speech rights is just as bad as "holding racist views yourself."

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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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