Well, before we rush off to the Supreme Court with our ACLU lawyer in tow or ask Congress to let Shreveport secede from the Union, here's a question: Can anyone corroborate the details of this story? Or have any details that I don't mention below? Just like many Katrina news stories, I am wary of articles that seem pretty outrageous at first glance. Newspaper articles are not always the gospel truth!

I actually looked up the ordinance in question. I have read the city council minutes where the ordinance was enacted and also the official Shreveport parade rules website. ORDINANCE NO. 2 OF 2002, section 78-118 states:



That's all of it. Sounds like a reasonable and legitimate reason, in spite of the First Amendment ramifications that I am also keeping in mind. What if people started bringing big billowy flags and sitting in the front rows of the movie theater? I know, sounds silly, but it's basically the same kind of rationale--people can't see the parade and public safety people can't see the public clearly.

I'm not sure if this 2002 flag provision was passed specifically due to this incident but something also happened in Shreveport's 2001 Mardis Gras parade where spectators peppered a high school band with all/predominantly African-American students with bottles and other objects as they marched and caused an uproar. Business leaders worried that investment and business would go elsewhere due to the racial overtone of the incident and they wanted something done.

However, one detail which I can't corrorborate is the statement in the article that even logos, like on car decals, T-shirts, or lawn chairs with the flag design, are also illegal. The article says it is the same ordinance, but the ordinance that bans flags from the parade route makes no mention of these other items at all. Neither do the official parade rules. So, if a police officer is telling someone to cover their lawn chair because it has the flag design on it, then it sounds like either that particular officer has misunderstood this parade-specific law or someone higher up is confused or overzealously interpreting the law and instructing the police on what to do. In fact, smaller flags that don't obstruct anyone's view should be fine, so it's not necessarily the law that is screwy, but perhaps in how it is being intrepreted and executed. Well, or else there is another ordinance out there that is being enforced but not reflected in the official parade rules.

Or maybe there's more to the story that I don't know. Maybe the city wants a way to prevent people from showing up with Neo-Nazi or KKK flags after the 2001 incident, so the city thinks they'll be legally justified in doing that if all flags were banned from the parade area? Or what about previous years? How was the law enforced since it was passed in 2002? Anyway, I think the news article does a disservice because it is a contoversial topic and there's no background to it, and this topic definitely needs some background info to put it into context.