Quote Originally Posted by gagged_Louise View Post
Well I didn't say everyone would like it or even think it's acceptable, but to most people in Europe (and e.g. Canada or Australia, I suspect) it's not near as inflamed an issue as in the USA (the same goes for the pledge of allegiance in schools). Most people here would scoff at the idea of expelling students or lawyers because they have participated at a rally where flags were burnt, or raising a hue and cry over a professor or a politician because they have been more or less closely involved with a group that burnt flags thirty years ago or that printed leaflets demanding that the Army should be disbanded. Flag defamation is not seen as utterly different from other kinds of political symbolism.
I think you're getting a lot of issues mixed up. If there were a hue and cry over every professor who'd participated in a radical rally during the sixties, we wouldn't have anyone teaching in our colleges.

There is an occasional hue and cry over professors that are blatantly anti-American. I, personally, have a bit of an issue about sending my kids to a college and them being required to take a course from someone who has a political agenda to indoctrinate them. That's my job.

In fact, we're seeing it at the grade school level. They just last year tried to teach my eight-year old that "nation" in the Pledge of Allegiance meant "government" -- i.e. that the Pledge is an oath of loyalty to the "government". A rather sick thing in a country founded on rebellion against a tyrannical government. I still haven't figured out if it that curriculum was a deliberate attempt to turn out good little workers or if the teacher was just stupid -- she was, after all, the same one who taught that thirty-two cents is written 0.32c/.