*Sigh* And just when we’d been able to focus on things like Katrina to hold the GOP’s feet to the fire, or when we could listen to the Roberts confirmations with, yeah, a lot of the standard rhetoric but also with a fairly open ear …
Here come the Culture Wars again!
Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools was ruled unconstitutional Wednesday by a federal judge who granted legal standing to two families represented by an atheist who lost his previous battle before the U.S. Supreme Court.
U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled that the pledge’s reference to one nation “under God” violates school children’s right to be “free from a coercive requirement to affirm God.”
Karlton said he was bound by precedent of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which in 2002 ruled in favor of Sacramento atheist Michael Newdow that the pledge is unconstitutional when recited in public schools.
*Sigh*
This is one of those where I can see (and even agree with) the philosophy and legalities behind this. At the same time, I also have a “ceremonial deism” bent that makes me want to shrug. After all, I know a lot of folks who grew up with the Pledge as a regular daily fixture who aren’t particularly reverent because of it (or, as far as I can tell, traumatized).
That said, I so wish this hadn’t happened now. Because, frankly, it’s a knee-jerk rallying cry for the Right who desperately right now want to get peoples’ minds off of, oh, Katrina, etc., and are dying to latch onto an issue like this, shifting from what the government is doing for/to us to some ideological debating point.
Hell, I know the first question anyone’s going to ask of Roberts tomorrow — and one which he will, quite properly, decline to answer, only further fueling the rhetorical brouhaha.
*Sigh*
Any claim that it’s mere ceremonial deism “contrasts with the 1954 House Report of the legislators who inserted the “under God” phrase into the pledge of allegiance. It said that the “under God” phrase was to “acknowledge the dependence of our people and our Government upon the moral directions of the Creator.” (Wikipedia)
I’m not saying it was inserted at the time on that basis. I’m saying that after five decades of rote reptition in thousands of classrooms with millions of kids, its explicit meaning is lost in its iconic nature — “onenationundergodindivisible” — such that removing it from the Pledge would make it more visible, and be more of an assertion, than leaving it in.
Well, it was always notable to me as I left the two words out.