Feelings have no place in the political process.

Last month the Senate defeated an amendment designed to prohibit the burning of the American flag. The freedom of speech guaranteed by our First Amendment escaped a revision by the hair of its chinny-chin-chin. By only one vote.

Old Glory wasn’t upset because it has no feelings or, to use the word’s current political incarnation — sensitivities. If it did, the PC crowd would certainly oppose burning it. They’d say that such an act was offensive. It would intimidate and hurt other flags, much as a cross burning intimidates black families or airport profiling insults Muslims.

If the flag had feelings, an organization like The National Flag Protection Association of America would no doubt be formed to fight the insidious prejudice known as flagism. Their lobbyists would petition national and local governments to enact laws forbiding language or action that would hurt flag feelings. A sensitivity training industry would emerge to educate flagists who marginalize and offend flags in word and deed. We’d see academics and pundits on book tours promoting titles that decry institutional flagism.

But not to worry. Despite the flag’s storied birth in the home of Betsy Ross, its physical survival at Ft. McHenry that inspired our National Anthem, despite the patriotic men and women who tried to protect it as epitomized by the apocryphal story of Barbara Frietchie and the very real one of Rick Monday, despite its inspirational, glorious hoisting on Iwo Jima and its timeless presence on the moon– despite all that and more, the flag has no feelings with which to generate an organization such as the NFPAA.

As an expression of free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment the flag can be stomped, burned, ripped, cut and abused by anyone as a statement of protest against the country it symbolizes. And we won’t hear a peep from any of our flags.

We expect this flag mugging from our enemies and it evokes rage in Americans who care about the flag. That our own citizens abuse the flag in the same way enrages these same Americans even more.

It is from this group of citizens, however, that our flag gets its feelings — its sensitivities, if you will. The group is mixed and diverse, but one can safely suggest that most are conservatives, or at least politically middle-of-the-road. Those who aren’t probably have personal reverence for the flag through the loss of a loved one in service to the country. Many simply were once taught in our public schools to salute and respect the flag . Regretfully, our “progressive” educational establishment has “disappeared” those sentiments from our schoolrooms.

It is in this group that the reverence for our flag is vested. This is the group that is offended by the flag’s desecration . But their sensitivities weren’t powerful enough to pass the Flag Amendment.

And as Martha Stewart likes to say, “This is a good thing.” We should be glad the effort failed. It would have been a lamentable irony that an abridgment of our First Amendment’s freedom of speech would come as a result of the very object that symbolizes it.

The amendment was not a product of principle but rather the political currency of the day – feelings, the feelings of both the legitimately offended Americans and the bandwagoneer politicians who rode the issue for votes. Feelings are the intellectual currency of the left, who justify their assaults on our freedom by invoking emotion, not reason.

Feelings should never determine law or policy. They are unpredictable, irrational and unruly. Feelings are inconsistent and contradictory. They have inspired restrictive speech codes and laws declaring that someone who is murdered because of hate for his race or sexual preference stands atop a hierarchy of victims, a hierarchy arbitrarily determined by race, sexual preference and some, but not all, ethnicities. Feelings have decreed that the lives of people in these groups are worth more than the lives of other murder victims.

This artificial hierarchy defeats the principle of our Constitution that declares all men equal, even those who’ve been offended by derogatory names or murdered by bigots . It also protects our right to say things that are offensive. Those principles have been corrupted by laws based on feelings. The flag amendment is the latest incarnation of this unfortunate development in our political dialogue.

Though the flag has no feelings it still has principle, by by only one vote. Let the flag continue to symbolize principle and leave the feelings to Barbra Streisand. Let freedom trump our understandable outrage over flag burners. Let us all be like our flag – no feelings, all principle.