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As with many things, it goes both ways. One of the neighborhoods in my town had a neighbor run a Nazi flag up the flagpole in his front yard, just because some
by fixermark 8y ago
As with many things, it goes both ways.
One of the neighborhoods in my town had a neighbor run a Nazi flag up the flagpole in his front yard, just because some homeowners are real-life edgelords. They would have appreciated having a blanket HOA rule about maintaining property values and "eyesores" to fall back on, because in the absence of such, it turned out to be pretty difficult in the American legal environment to find anything with which they could compel him to take the flag down.
On the other hand, I've seen a different neighborhood try to use the local covenants to ban a backyard solar farm, because they argued solar panels are uniformly an eyesore. Tools are tools; people use them.
- driverdan 8y ago> it turned out to be pretty difficult in the American legal environment to find anything with which they could compel him to take the flag down. Pretty difficult? It should be impossible. Remember that pesky constitutional amendment that guarantees free speech? It applies.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fixermark 8y agoIt does apply, but it's unclear whether it leads to optimal outcomes. Germany has outlawed public displays of Nazi symbols; it doesn't have the problems of overt fascism that the US is currently struggling with. Perhaps it has merely replaced them with covert fascism, and perhaps this is merely correlation that doesn't imply causation. But I get the distinct impression that such is not actually the case; that legal disapproval of naziism in Germany re-enforces general disapproval. Plus, America's First Amendment doesn't uniformly guarantee freedom of speech. Hate speech, for example, and incitement to riot, are two categories that are generally not considered protected. I don't think flying a Nazi flag falls under either of those (though if one really squints hard, it could set a person up for much worse---the US negotiated a peace with Germany after World War II, but not with the Nazi party. One could make a claim that flying an enemy flag on American soil is tantamount to claiming that territory has been conquered, which opens the situation up to military intervention ;) ).
- driverdan 8y ago> Hate speech, for example... Of course that's protected. The only thing that isn't protected is a clear and timely threat like your example of inciting a riot.
- greedo 8y agoAny HOA that tried to keep him from flying said flag would have a hard time defending its actions in court.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]