Soldiers and Sailors Should Salute the Flag or Face Discipline

David French:

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the social justice warrior of the day — Petty Officer 2nd Class Janaye Ervin. Petty Officer Ervin refused to salute during morning colors, the Navy is investigating, and now there’s a Change.org petition circulating demanding that no “adverse action” be taken against her.

Ervin explains herself with classic SJW incoherence:

“I have been proudly serving in the US Navy Reserve Force since November 2008,” she wrote, according to Military.com. “I have pledged to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and to spread freedom and democracy around the world. I will never waver from that pledge. I feel like a hypocrite singing about the ‘land of the free’ when I know that only applies to some Americans. I will gladly stand again, when ALL AMERICANS are afforded the same freedom.”

Perhaps in the new, fundamentally transformed military, soldiers and sailors should go ahead and provide superior officers with complete lists of orders they won’t obey for the sake of social justice. What if a sailor knows an officer supports Donald Trump, can they refuse to salute when he passes? We all know that when there’s an injustice anywhere, justice is imperiled everywhere, so let’s all take a knee at the next anthem. And the next time you’re ordered to war — to your possible death — on a ship flying the flag you scorn? Well, that’s optional too. The cause has to meet your standards for “just.”

There are some people who believe that service in the military is little more than a government job in uniform. Then there are some people who understand the meaning of the flag to the military and the power of the national flag in combat — people like the men of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, one of the first African-American units in the Civil War and a unit that paid a terrible price in clashes like the Battle of Fort Wagner:

A mounted general and his staff rode up before the assembled ranks. The officer was handsome and smartly dressed, and grasped the reins of his prancing gray steed with white-gloved hands. Brigadier General George C. Strong pointed down the stretch of sand to the sinister hump of a Confederate earthwork that loomed amidst the roiling smoke and spitting fire of the guns. Loudly, Strong asked, ‘Is there a man here who thinks himself unable to sleep in that fort tonight?’ ‘No!’ shouted the 54th.

The general called out the bearer of the national colors, and grasped the flag. ‘If this man should fall, who will lift the flag and carry it on?’ After the briefest of pauses, Shaw stepped forward, and taking a cigar from between his teeth responded, ‘I will.’ The colonel’s pledge elicited what Adjutant Garth Wilkinson James later described as ‘the deafening cheers of this mighty host of men, about to plunge themselves into the fiery vortex of hell.’

That was just the beginning:

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