Connecticut has had a law against burning crosses and other religious objects like the Quran since 1980 but the law comes with a significant loophole that could make it difficult to deter someone like that obnoxious cleric who wanted to burn the Quran in his Florida churchyard.

The law makes it a crime to desecrate public property, monuments or structures, religious objects, symbols or houses of worship, cemeteries or private structures. But it gets more specific about crosses, saying it is a crime to burn a cross on public or private property - without the written consent of the property owner. Or, to put it another way, it's not a crime if the burner has permission but it could be if the burner's criminal intent is proven.

It was passed after a number of cross burnings in the state when busing and a proposed Martin Luther King holiday were issues and swastikas had been painted on synagogues in West Hartford.

Desecration of places of worship wasn't an issue in the debate over the bill but some legislators were rightly concerned about whether some cross burnings on private property could be considered a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. Did the legislature, as the great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, have an obligation to protect not only freedom of speech for those who agree with us, "but freedom for the speech that we hate?"

Or is cross burning or now, Quran burning, whether on private property or not, an act of terror, intimidation or incitement to violence, and therefore more akin to another Holmes observation that "the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting 'fire' in a theater and causing panic."

During a Judiciary Committee hearing on the cross-burning bill, the late Rep. Richard Tulisano, a strong civil liberties advocate, asked State's Atty. Austin McGuigan, how he could "prove that when I burn it (a cross) on my property, I'm intending to terrorize somebody," and McGuigan replied, it would have to be judged case by case, with the state obliged to prove a cross burning on private property was a meant to terrorize or intimidate beyond a reasonable doubt.

And there it was left. The new law didn't initially stop cross burnings in the state and they came back with a vengeance in the spring of 1981 when a small number of haters set out to prove the private-property exemption provided them all the cover they needed.

Connecticut's Ku Klux Klan, such as it was, was involved and a self-styled imperial wizard began to commute on weekends from the south to preside at cross burnings on a privately owned field in Windham.

I was news director of WFSB-TV at the time and we - and most of the media - dutifully covered this bizarre-for-Connecticut ritual once or twice but when the imperial wizard decided to make it a regularly scheduled photo opportunity, we reconsidered.

Granted, fiery crosses featuring klansmen and other kooks wearing pointy-headed, white hoods were probably more interesting than the usual weekend news fare, but I feared we were contributing too generously to the cross-burners' message and making them far more important than their very small numbers warranted.

Although they may have had a First Amendment right to burn their crosses, I figured we had a First Amendment right not to cover them, a decision made especially easy when the Klan refused to allow a black reporter into one evening's festivities in Windham.

We announced we'd no longer cover the demonstrations, but would cover any newsworthy events surrounding them, like arrests and court appearances. I had a reporter and photographer on hand in case a riot broke out or someone decided to take a whack at the imperial wizard but no more cross burnings were seen on Channel 3 news broadcasts.

I don't remember others publicly following suit, but in a few weeks, coverage kind of disappeared and pretty soon, the Klan did too. Funny how that works.

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury.