Until this week, my hometown of Hull was best known, outside its borders, as the coastal peninsula submerged by the Blizzard of ’78. But now that Hull selectwoman Regina Burke has taken a stand against the war in Iraq, that’s likely to change.

During a Board of Selectmen meeting last Tuesday night, Burke remained seated during the Pledge of Allegiance. " Every time I see the flag, I can picture George Bush wearing it as a toga, and I don’t know what it stands for anymore other than for his particular financial group and followers, " Burke said at the time, according to an account in the Patriot Ledger. It didn’t take long for Burke’s stand to become national news.

My reaction to the episode is simple: Burke obviously has the right to do what she did. It's nothing new to the town, where, in the 1970s, a handful of students — generally Jehovah’s Witnesses — routinely asked to be excused from the Pledge at the Jacobs Elementary School. At the same time, however, Burke had to know that given the current climate, her remarks would cause a furor both within the town and beyond. Susan Ovans, editor of the Hull Times, says that of 12 letters she has received for next week’s issue, nine have been about the Pledge controversy — all critical of Burke’s decision.

More surprising has been some of the out-of-town reaction to what Burke did. Namely, the perception that Hull is some Berkeley-by-the-Sea den of leftism. (One poster on the conservative Web site FreeRepublic.com referred to the episode as " news from the People’s Republik of Massachusetts. " ) But that’s not the town I grew up in, where participation in the annual Memorial Day Parade to the town cemetery, where Revolutionary War soldiers and their French counterparts are buried, was all but mandatory. The famous War of 1812 sea battle between the Lawrence and the Chesapeake — which contributed the famous phrase " Don’t give up the ship! " to American history — took place in sight of the shore. I once participated in a Veterans of Foreign Wars Speech competition that was so hotly contested that we had to go into Star Search–style overtime. The town had a memorial to Vietnam veterans before the federal government in Washington, DC, did.

It’s true that Hull has become gentrified since I grew up; it’s no longer the tight-knit, hardscrabble, blue-collar community I remember. Expensive single-malt whiskeys and fine wines have replaced " A Street Vodka " at the local liquor store. But Burke has lived in Hull for years. More to the point, her actions fall squarely in line with the town’s tradition of clamorous and chaotic public meetings. At the same meeting at which Burke took her stance against the war, a separate tussle broke out between two other selectmen. (It started as an argument over a $35,000 budget item for a social-service " outreach coordinator " and escalated into a vituperative dispute that raised the specter of recall for both members, one of whom, Lennie Hersch, has been making controversial statements for years.) Hull, after all, is a tiny sliver of land surrounded on all three sides by ocean. During the long gray months of winter, residents can feel entirely cut off from the rest of the world.

And dissent — even unpopular dissent — is central to the town’s traditions. Hull was founded by two men — John Oldham and Reverend John Lyford — who in 1625 had been banished from Plymouth Colony for plotting against the colony’s military leader, Miles Standish. In an odd way, Burke fits into the town's history better than anyone could have imagined.