Supreme Court to rule on God in Pledge of Allegiance

The Supreme Court has agreed to review the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that requiring school children (through high school) to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools is a violation of the First Amendment because it has "under God" in it.

Daily Kos points out that "the ruling will come next June, just in time to become an explosive campaign issue." Come on now, Kos, you don't think the Supreme Court would deliberately inject itself into Presidential politics, now do you? Uh, well, ummm, let me think about that one for a while.

This will be a red-meat issue for Christian Right voters who will vote for Bush and the Republicans anyway. But I don't think it's likely to be a useful campaign issue, because the Democrats finessed the issue right after the Appeals Court ruling, as this Sacramento Bee article describes.

If the Supreme Court upholds the ruling, which I'm guessing is likely, the Democrats will say something along the lines of, "It's a terrible ruling. But we need to abide by the Court's decision and redouble our efforts to transmit sound religious values to our children at home and in church. Now, let's talk about the Republicans and that 'liberty and justice for all' part of the Pledge."

Since I'm not running for anything, I'll say that while this obviously isn't the most momentous issue of church and state that ever arose, my strong preference is for a separation of church and state. Congress in 1954 chose to give the Pledge a religious character by adding "under God" to it. And they knew when they did that it might raise issues of conscience in schools for some, because the previous decade the Court had ruled in a case involving Jehovah's Witnesses that kids with religious objections couldn't be required to recite the Pledge.

Personally, I think that we Americans get a bit idolatrous about some of our patriotic symbols, like the flag, the Pledge and the national anthem. And the flip side of idolizing them is that we also trivialize them so that people don't stop to think about them. The flag and various representations of it are everywhere. We recite the Pledge of Allegiance at weekly civic club meetings and play the national anthem at ball games. It becomes empty ritual after a while.

Tags: pledge of allegiance