Apartment Residents Told To Take Down U.S. Flags

.

Residents of the Oaks Apartments in Albany have reportedly been told to take down their flags. Even this one, on the back of a motorcycle, is part of the reported ban.

Apartment residents told to take down U.S. flags
KATU.com Portland
ALBANY, Ore. – At the Oaks Apartments in Albany, the management can fly their own flag advertising one and two bedroom apartments – but residents have been told they can’t fly any flags at all.
Jim Clausen flies the American flag from the back of his motorcycle. He has a son in the military heading back to Iraq, and the flag – he said – is his way of showing support.

“This flag stands for all those people,” said Clausen, an Oaks Apartment resident. “It stands for the people that can no longer stand – who died in wars. That’s why I fly this flag.”

But to Oaks Apartment management, Clausen said, the American flag symbolizes problems.
He was told to remove the red, white and blue from both of his rides, or face eviction.

“It floored me,” he said. “I can’t believe she was saying what she was saying.”

Even long-time residents like Sharron White, who has flown a flag on her car for eight years, has been told to take it down.

White said management told her that “someone might get offended.”

“I just said to her ‘They’ll just have to get over it,'” White said.

Resident we talked to who had been approached to take down their flags all told us the same thing: that management told them the flags could be offensive because they live in a diverse community.
Attempts to find out for ourselves why management would ban flags were unsuccessful. KATU wanted to talk to management at Oaks Apartments, but no one has returned our calls. The woman we were told had made the decision said she was “not going to answer any questions.”
The mother of one soldier fighting in Iraq put up a poster in her son’s apartment window when she learned of the ban. Her son’s roommate said he’ll risk eviction to make sure it stays.
Another Oaks Apartment resident, Judith Sherer, doesn’t have a car. Instead she carries an American flag around the complex to protest the ban, and wonders if the flag pin she wears is next to be “singled out.”

“If I put it on and I walk outside, what’s going to happen?” Sherer muses. “Am I going to be confronted by a manager about this?”

We’re told the ban includes sports flags and even flag stickers on cars.

UPDATE:
Flag ban lifted at Oaks Apartments after outcry
ALBANY, Ore. — Flags are OK again at an Albany apartment complex after the property manager reviewed the policy and decided she didn’t have the legal standing to ban flags from the exteriors of apartments and vehicles parked at the complex.

“If people want to fly any flag of any nationality, it’s their right,” said Barb Holcomb with Oaks Apartments.

KVAL News also contacted the American Civil Liberties Union to ask whether the policy banning flags from the apartment complex violated any laws. The answer from the ACLU: No.
But Holcomb said she received different legal counsel that led her to believe she is wrong to ban the flags.

“When a tenant rents the unit, the inside of the unit belongs to the tenant,” Holcomb said Wednesday. “All automobiles and things attached to the automobiles are the personal property of the tenant.”

Holcomb said the flag ban was based on interpretation of two sections of the rental agreement all tenants sign.

“What we were trying to do was to keep the peace,” she said, declining to say whether a specific incident sparked enforcement of the ban. “Obviously, we were wrong. If the peace needs to be kept, it belongs to the police department.”

She said her boss has stood by her — both when she enforced the policy and when she lifted it.

“I made a policy. I was wrong,” she said. “My boss is a wonderful man. He backed me 100 percent — even when I was wrong.”

The story garnered national attention because of the ban on American flags, although the policy did not specifically single out the U.S. flag and allow the flags of other nations.
The result for Holcomb: Numerous phone calls from the media.

“If they want to speak to me, they speak to me,” she said of the calls. “If they want to yell at me, they yell at me.”

KVAL News asked whether she had talked to the resident who originally went to the media with the story. Holcomb said no, although she said she would talk to him — and would have talked to him before he went to the media. Holcomb said he did not approach her before talking to KVAL News partner KATU.

“He’s just a romping, stomping patriot,” Holcomb said.

Wild Thing’s comment……..
I would never feel the same way about the place I lived if I had gone through this. What this woman, Barb Holcomb, did was unforgivable!
Anyone who gets offended by an American flag is in the wrong effing country.

……Thank you RAC for sending this to me.
RAC has a website that is awesome. 336th Assault Helicopter Company
13th Combat Aviation Battalion – 1st Aviation Brigade – Soc Trang, Republic of Vietnam