Here is where I am coming from. I like the idea of free speech--and I like the idea of petitioning your government to redress your grievences.

So, when somebody uses soaring rhetoric to declaim some government action or inaction policy or lack thereof, I am generally sympathetic to where they are coming from. They have a complaint. Sometimes the complaint is reasonable, sometimes it isn't. But I think it is fair to hear them out.

To me, what the Rev Wright said may be politicaly toxic to the mainstream, but it wasn't offensive to me, because I understood where he was coming from: a love of justice, and hunger for righteousness. And if the Tuskegee Experiment had never happened, there would never be such conspiratorial thinking about Aids. I'm just saying. But Rev Wright was denounced for reminding America of its original sin of slavery, terrorism against black people, and black pain, frustration and anger in a society that has pledged its sacred honor to truths it holds to be self evident, that all men are created equal. White folks mostly don't like to be reminded of this history. And they resent any messenger that brings the subject up. Modern white folks didn't do these things, that was back in the day. Don't try to put that buring tire around MY neck. So, to hear an angry old black man saying the words---it resonates down the smoky corridors of memory and fate.

However, these secessionist Alaskans echo down a different corridor--the same corridor that birthed the Confederate States of America and the KKK. The notion of rejecting a country that must be a melting pot of people you cannot stand, whose alien ideas you cannot tolerate, is something to which, unfortunately, many, many Americans can relate.

So--"I won't be buried under their damn flag." Does not have the same meaning as "God damn America, it's in the Bible".

In a strictly legal, language parsing sense, it sounds very similar--but these sentiments pluck very different chords in the American soul.