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UNDER GOD
BY PETER KURTH (published 07.03.02)
Well, score one for our side, however briefly and without a prayer of
success -- you'll forgive the expression.
I refer to the "God" business -- that is, the "under
God" business -- and the decision of the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of
Appeals that the inclusion of the words "one nation, under God"
in the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional, a violation of the
separation of church and state.
"A profession that we are a nation `under God' is identical, for
Establishment Clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation `under
Jesus,' a nation `under Vishnu,' a nation `under Zeus,' or a nation `under
no god,'" said Judge Alfred T. Goodwin, speaking for the court:
"None of these professions can be neutral with respect to
religion."
Amen. I've known this since I was old enough to crawl, and I mean
that literally. The first angry letter my mother ever sent to a newspaper
was in June 1954, when Congress, pandering to fears of communism, flying
saucers and nuclear bombs, caved in to President Eisenhower and the Knights
of Columbus and stuck "under God" into the Pledge, smack in
between the nation and its indivisibility. I was less than a year old at
the time, but I grew up in a house where this perfidy was never forgotten.
I suppose everyone knows by now -- don't they? -- that
the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a card-carrying socialist, Francis
Bellamy, and that it first entered the public schools in honor of
Christopher Columbus. There's a topic best avoided. The Pledge had already
been altered once, over Bellamy's protests, before the bingo crowd got
their hands on it during the McCarthy years; Bellamy never lived to see the
further perversion of his work. On June 14, 1954, President Eisenhower declared:
"From this day forward, the millions of our school children will
daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and every rural school
house, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty."
This sounds uncannily like our own President Bush, who remarked after
the California ruling last week, "America is a nation ... that values our
relationship with an Almighty." Of course, he forgot to add the nouns:
Almighty dollar, Almighty oil, Almighty blather, etc.
"The declaration of God in the Pledge of Allegiance doesn't
violate rights," Bush insists. "As a matter of fact, it's a
confirmation of the fact that we received our rights from God, as
proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence."
Very nice -- that's "fact" twice in one sentence. But the
Declaration of Independence isn't the U. S. Constitution, which never
mentions God at all and moves from there to its first amendment:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…." This is meant to be
a two-way street; freedom of religion carries a price, which is that no
religion may impose itself statutorily on any American citizen.
No matter: The California ruling has already been suspended and hasn't got a chance in hell of
standing up on review. Congress -- including Vermont's touted "Independent"
delegation -- has proved 100 percent craven on this issue, blasting hot air
about "values" and squawking for a Constitutional re-write.
"Let us not wait for the Supreme Court to act on this,"
says Senator John Warner (R.-Virginia).
"This decision is just nuts," answers majority leader Tom
Daschle (D.-South Dakota). They, too, no less than Bush, want you to be
thinking in slogans and cheap patriotism, the better to keep your eyes off
the Almighty corruption in their coffers and halls -- 17,000 people fired
from WorldCom last week, while their miscreant employers are still eating
lunch at "Les Halles."
On the Pledge of Allegiance, Bush spokesman Ari
Fleischer sounds like Eva Perón. "This
decision will not sit well with the American people," Fleischer says.
"Certainly it does not sit well with the president of the United States."
In fact, the president of the United States has nothing to do with this decision. It
is, properly if forlornly, in judicial hands, where conservative judges will
make sure it's overturned. You've got nothing to worry about.
According to polls, 87 percent of Americans interviewed are in favor
of keeping "under God" in the Pledge. I expect this has more to
do with the way they learned it than anything else. So lousy with cowardice
are the press and the pundits on this issue that Sunday's New York Times saw fit to run a
front-page story under the headline, "Court That Ruled on Pledge Often
Runs Afoul of Justices."
"The court that pronounced the Pledge of Allegiance
unconstitutional has a reputation for being wrong," The Times reports, "and critics say
its unwieldy size is to blame." A bit farther on we learn that
"wrong" doesn't mean "incorrect" in this case -- or
even, you know, wrong -- only that the 9th Circuit frequently ends up on
the losing side of the cases it judges. Way, way down in the story, where
most will never go, a California law professor is finally allowed to explain:
"The opinions written by conservatives on the 9th Circuit are
just as likely to be overturned as opinions by liberals. When you're
dealing with hard questions, a reversal rate does not mean the court of
appeals was wrong and the Supreme Court was right. It means the Supreme
Court got the last word."
Y'all remember the Supreme Court? They're the ones who put Junior in
office.
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