House of Eratosthenes

Flags are OK again at an Albany apartment complex after the property manager reviewed the policy and decided she didn’t have the legal standing to ban flags from the exteriors of apartments and vehicles parked at the complex.

“If people want to fly any flag of any nationality, it’s their right,” said Barb Holcomb with Oaks Apartments.

KVAL News also contacted the American Civil Liberties Union to ask whether the policy banning flags from the apartment complex violated any laws. The answer from the ACLU: No.

But Holcomb said she received different legal counsel that led her to believe she is wrong to ban the flags.

“When a tenant rents the unit, the inside of the unit belongs to the tenant,” Holcomb said Wednesday. “All automobiles and things attached to the automobiles are the personal property of the tenant.”

Seems like obvious stuff, no?

Well the previous story was quite the “WTF??” moment.

Jim Clausen flies the American flag from the back of his motorcycle. He has a son in the military heading back to Iraq, and the flag – he said – is his way of showing support.

“This flag stands for all those people,” said Clausen, an Oaks Apartment resident. “It stands for the people that can no longer stand – who died in wars. That’s why I fly this flag.”

But to Oaks Apartment management, Clausen said, the American flag symbolizes problems.

He was told to remove the red, white and blue from both of his rides, or face eviction.

“It floored me,” he said. “I can’t believe she was saying what she was saying.”

Very reasonable editorial in the Democrat Herald that managed to make the point everyone else seems to have missed:

One has to sympathize with apartment managers in an increasingly litigious age, where people quickly take umbrage for any reason or no reason at all. But once you respond to these challenges with a rule that in an American town it’s against the rules to display the American flag on your own motorcycle or your own car, you have gone too far.

It’s quite reasonable — in settings in which a management has the proper legal authority, which is another issue — to issue bans on message-paraphernalia that include flags but carry a special exemption for Old Glory. The apartment management easily could’ve, would’ve and perhaps should’ve gotten away with this if they went that common-sense route.

But NO…(from the second story linked above)

Resident we talked to [sic] who had been approached to take down their flags all told us the same thing: that management told them the flags could be offensive because they live in a diverse community.

Attempts to find out for ourselves why management would ban flags were unsuccessful. KATU wanted to talk to management at Oaks Apartments, but no one has returned our calls. The woman we were told had made the decision said she was “not going to answer any questions.” [emphasis mine]

Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

Try this on: Just take the USA out of it to suspend the emotion, and think through this logically. You are a native of Country X and you are happy and proud to be a native of Country X. You also have a brother who is a native of Country X and has chosen to enlist in X’s all-volunteer military force. You don’t know if you’ll ever see that relative again…but you fly the flag of Country X to show your support.

Then you’re told because the community — inside of the borders of Country X — is diverse, the flag will have to go, because someone might be offended.

The issue is obviously not Country X’s superiority. It’s Country X’s culture, and whether or not Country X is allowed to have one. It should be obvious to anyone…anyone at all…that the scenario above would be hideously offensive to the flag-waver of Country X. How could it not be? And yet you’re being told a theoretical offense taken by someone…someone not only unidentified, but someone who has yet to happen-along…somehow trumps your very real, and very justifiable, present, current, right-now offense.

That, undeniably, is a second-offense.

The problem isn’t quite so much the manager’s passions against her country, although I suspect that is present as well. The problem is that, because the bell-curve of attention spans is shaped more like a backward-ski-slope than a bell, businesses have taken to communicating their actions and motives in well-worn cliches, like “in an effort to reduce our carbon emissions,” “to help save the planet” and “because we live in a diverse community.”

As my example illustrates, with the US of A removed and therefore all the passion connected to it removed, even the lazy observer can easily see: This is bullshit. If the object of the exercise is to remove or reduce the potential to offend, it is a fail on a massive level.

Well, in times like these…
- thebastidge | 10/15/2009 @ 16:02
[…] who wrote to have the Nativity scene removed from Travis AFB, to the apartment manager lady who demanded an American flag be taken down because someone in the “diverse community” might……we’re never actually introduced to anybody who’s born the brunt of this abuse of […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 12/22/2011 @ 20:02

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Offensive Flag?Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Offensive Flag?
Thursday, October 15th, 2009