WACO, Texas -- Put away that "Free Winona" T-shirt. Let's unchain Trent Lott's tongue.

Come on, civil libertarians. Hush up Sen. Lott? No, let's encourage him to say more. Tell us, Senator, about the glory days of segregation. And tell us more about yourself. Don't stop.

After all these years and all that power over our very existence, shouldn't we know better the once and future Senate majority leader? We should.

Speaking of getting to know someone, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas spoke the other day while court was in session. That fact unto itself was felt by the Australian Seismological Center. What Thomas was reacting to, Lott remembers from those good-old days: cross burnings.

One would hope that when Thomas finally spoke it would be from deep within his soul, defending a gutsy and unpopular constitutional principle. No such luck.

Really, the only parallel between these two matters is the matter of race, and the fact that both men spoke their minds in revealing ways.

For Lott, it shouldn't have been news when he said the nation would have been better off with a segregationist president, Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. It wasn't the first time he said it.

Lott's sympathies long have been clear. He is a long-time friend of Mississippi's white-separatist Council of Conservative Citizens, Jim Crow holdovers whose Web site (my, bigots have become advanced) warns of our nation becoming a "slimy brown mass of glop."

And Lott's sympathies weren't abandoned with old times. In 1992, he told the group it stood for the "right principles and the right philosophy."

Really, the outrage shouldn't be that Lott thought Thurmond was presidential material. It is that Lott is Senate majority leader material.

It is disingenuous for anyone who pays attention in Washington to feign surprise at Lott's comments. He is what he is. He is where he is, in power. And he is there because his sympathies mesh with those of many constituents.

As for Thomas' revealing outburst, don't expect condemnations, because what he said won't find many foes except among civil libertarians.

Thomas spoke to rationalize a Virginia law banning cross burnings. Like laws against flag burning, it's unnecessary when one has laws on arson, harassment, making terroristic threats, even burning without a permit.

The Supreme Court ruled that symbolic political speech could not be curtailed in the form of flag burning. In effect, and in absence of other criminal laws such as arson or inciting to riot, it chose not to criminalize the mere act of symbolic speech, even if most reprehensible.

Thomas said that a burning cross is "unlike any symbol in our society." He may be right. But a government based on free expression cannot anoint a symbol as anything more than what any individual sees it to be.

Cross burning per se is distinct from hate crimes, actual crimes -- assault, vandalism, arson -- compounded by intent to terrorize many. The burning of a cross in a victim's yard would be a hate crime -- and should be prosecuted with vigor -- because it involved many illegal acts including arson and trespassing. But a cross itself is just an image, like this X. Can government tell you not to burn this page if it has a cross on it?

Unfortunately, Thomas apparently thinks so. He broke his general silence on the court to mouth popular sentiment and the whims of authoritarians who would like government to do our thinking and praying for us, which has almost become the Republican Party line.

Thomas could have surprised us with an analysis that respects free expression even when the message is most vile, like Sen. Lott's words.

But in either case, Lott's words or Thomas's, it was revealing. For people of such power, it's certainly worth knowing where their heads are.

John Young is Opinion Page editor of the Waco (Texas) Tribune-Herald.

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