newjerseynewsroom.com

BY GINA G. SCALA

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

In a week that began with nationwide services for the men and women who paid the ultimate price for their country, a 75-year-old Phillipsburg woman is being threatened with eviction if she doesn’t remove three small American flags from her public housing apartment balcony.

“They told me I can’t have the American flag up, because someone else might hang up a Nazi flag,” Dawn Paulus said in an interview with The Express-Times. “They’ve sent a maintenance man over to take it down, but I didn’t let him take it down.”

Paulus was asked to remove the flags because it violates her lease agreement, said Paul Rummerfield, executive director of the Phillipsburg Housing Authority.

In the same Express-Times article, Rummerfield said the issue “isn’t about flying the American flag. It’s about lease enforcement and how we have to adhere to federal laws and safety rules.”

Paulus lives on the sixth floor of the John F. O'Donnell Apartments. The concern, said Rummerfield in an interview with 6ABC.com, is if the flag fell while someone was walking under it.

On the other hand, Rummerfield told the Express Times under the Fair Housing Act, if the nonprofit allows tenants to hang flags, they can’t discriminate on what flags are flown.

“Once you allow anyone to hang the American flag or any flag, then you have no recourse when someone hangs a flag that may be objectionable, such as a pirate or Confederate flag,” Rummerfield said.

The housing authority’s demands are a violation of the First Amendment, said Brad Jacob, a constitutional law expert at Regent University in Virginia.

“Their justification is we must ban all because some of it will offend,” Jacob said in an interview with The Daily Caller. “Traditionally, that’s a losing argument. Traditionally, free speech wins out. And if someone is offended at another person’s speech, they’re just offended.”

In 2010, Iraqi War veteran Charlie Price, who lived with his wife Dawn in a Wisconsin apartment complex, was also threatened with eviction if he didn’t immediately stop flying Ol’ Glory. Incidentally, the flag was hanging inside the couple’s apartment; not outside. Its visibility was the issue.

At that time, Dawn Price told the NBC affiliate, “It’s ridiculous. I couldn’t believe that in America someone would be told that they can’t fly the American flag.”

The couple was permitted to fly the flag through Memorial Day, according to reports from Fox News at the time.

The unrestricted freedom to fly the American Flag was guaranteed in the Freedom to Display the American Flag Act of 2005.

Under that act, no "condominium association, cooperative association, or residential real estate management association" may stop homeowners from flying the American flag. The law, however, does not apply to renters.