Some conserative religious groups have criticized the U.S. military's decision to support Wiccan soldiers who wish to practice witchcraft. Resurrection of the Flag Desecration Amendment by Edward Tabash Congress recently resurrected by a margin of 11-7 in the Senate Judiciary Committee the Flag Desecration Amendment. It now moves on to the full U.S. Senate. The Amendment would substantially weakened the First Amendment by allowing branches of government to punish the physical desecration of one's personally owned replica of the American flag. Since this amendment seeks to prohibit desecration, it is essentially a blashpemy law.
Desecration is a religious term that applies only when something is deemed sacred.
This amendment thus violates the fundamental tenets of a secular society by formally transforming a secular symbol into something sacred. A spate of recent astronomical discoveries has led to the conclusion that our solar system is not unique in the universe. We're now finding, as physicist and theorist Carl Sagan predicted twenty years ago, that there are planets in orbit about other stars. San Francisco State astronomers Geoffrey Marcy and Paul Butler alone have discovered twelve planets outside of our solar system. It seems that planet formation is not as improbable as it was once thought.