Aren't the sectioning commands supposed to work inside longtable?

Question

Using sectioning commands such as section, subsection inside a longtable produce the following error:

! LaTeX Error: Something's wrong--perhaps a missing \item.

Is this normal?

Here is the code (created with LyX):

% Preview source code

%% LyX 1.6.7 created this file.  For more info, see http://www.lyx.org/.
%% Do not edit unless you really know what you are doing.
\documentclass[english]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin9]{inputenc}
\usepackage{array}
\usepackage{longtable}

\makeatletter

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% LyX specific LaTeX commands.
%% Because html converters don't know tabularnewline
\providecommand{\tabularnewline}{\\}

\makeatother

\usepackage{babel}

\begin{document}
\begin{longtable}{|>{\centering}p{0.3\textwidth}|>{\raggedright}p{0.4\textwidth}|}
\hline 
\section*{Name} & \section*{Description}\tabularnewline
\hline
\hline 

a & b
\tabularnewline
\hline 
a & b

\tabularnewline
\hline 
a & b

\tabularnewline
\hline
\end{longtable}
\end{document}

Answer 1

Protect them:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin9]{inputenc}
\usepackage{array}
\usepackage{longtable}


\begin{document}
\begin{longtable}{|p{0.3\textwidth}|p{0.4\textwidth}|}
\protect\section*{Name} & \protect\section*{Description}
\end{longtable}
\end{document}