Judge says pledge is out of bounds
Thanks to Michael Newdow, a misguided activist intent on spoiling something that millions of people have no problem with, we have this:
U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton said the pledge’s reference to one nation “under God” violates students’ constitutional right to be “free from a coercive requirement to affirm God.”
The ruling is sure to be struck down by a higher court, and Newdow will be forced to sit at home scratching “In God We Trust” off his nickels and muttering, “One nation… indivisible…” but not until after California school districts spend millions on legal fees.
If “under God” is removed from the pledge –in my opinion it turns the pledge into virtual idol worship of the state. Then, can Christians recite the pledge in good conscience. I think some on the radical left want to harm and divide our country more than they want religion removed from the “public square.”
And to think this all started with the Lemon test and various other “church-state” cases which only empowered the Supreme Court to interpellate into local policy-making and school administration.
The First Amendment is very simple and crystal clear. It is NOT a grant of power to the Court to strike down on its basis numerous policies it doesn’t like. Establishment of a church or a religion is so narrow and defineable a concept that virtually all of the “unconstitutional” practices on this front that the Court has found are not in fact out of bounds but in the minds of judges who have determined to use the power of the bench to overrule local officials.
Newdow is a bit more than misguided. He is a militant atheist and explicitly so.
What I do not understand is that if there is no God and that all of us and the world itself are the sum result of so many “happy accidents” over the course of how many billions of years since the big bang, then aren’t there other more important issues that we should worry about? Things like global warming, and pollution, and energy depletion? Crusading for the obliteration of any reference to the Almighty seems to be quite selfish and self-serving.
In the unfortunate years when I was an atheist (13-18), I was also attending a Roman Catholic boys’ high school, as both I and my parents felt it was the place where I could get the best education available (and it was: 4 years each of science, mathematics, U.S. and world history, English, American, European and world literature, political theory, RC theology and world religions, French and Latin).
During that time, for each day of class, we had to say the Pledge of Allegiance. I said it, as I believed it then and believe it now, but always when I said it, I paused in silence when the words “under God” were spoken. This occasioned some comment by my fellow students, but was the basis for some interesting conversations.
I was perhaps immature when I established this modus vivendi, but I find it less immature than Newdow, and his attempts to regulate what the majority of Americans can and cannot say.