'Under God' Stays In Pledge

I am glad that it stays! If we are not under God, are we under Satan? Michael Newdow is peharps under Satan?

 

I don't know if I'd say that. I prefer to think that he's under a supreme air of arrogance and self-importance, much like many liberals. He's willing to sacrifice the safety of his 10 year-old daughter in order to further his political agenda.

Newdow is a physician who went to law school just so he could argue this case. What else does anyone need to know about this "man"?

 

1) "...under God" does violate the Constitution.

2) "The Pledge" is pointless anyway. I never saw the value in forcing kids to memorize and chant a paragraph that they don't understand.

3) If you want "...under God" in your pledge, by all means include it. Add the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer if you wish. But why insist that everyone conform to a religious belief.

4) This country has bigger things to worry about.

 

The Consititution guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

 

And the constitution does guarantee against persecution, harassment, taxation, forced church (or whatever) attendance, and direct links between the federal government and organized religious bodies.

It does not guarantee, having been written and adjudicated by adults who assumed a certain ability to cope and a certain absence of whiny prissiness, that somebody somewhere in an access of supernal touchiness won't petulantly bitch
"I'm offended", even though no one is being persecuted, harassed, tithe-taxed, forced to attend religious services, or living in a state where the Yuppie Unmanly Church of Keening (YUCK)--or the Southern Baptists, or the Gnesios, or the Roman Catholics, or anybody else--is linked to the government and receiving government particular endorsement or support.

Oh, yeah: to my loony-tune extremist buds--this time on the left, for a change--you have no idea what harassment and even violence I have experienced in these great US of A in the name of religion, so don't resort to ad hominem attacks based on guesswork about my allegedly uniform majority-side experience. Apart from being intellectually unjustified, you will be mistaken as to the (irrelevant) facts.

The kid already could, according to a judgment geared to the religious scruples of IIRC Jehovah's Witnesses, sit out the pledge. Her brave father wishes her to have the right, not only to sit it out, but to drown it out. I am not much of a fan of the pledge for a whole raft of reasons. But this is just silly showing off and using one's child as a stalking-horse for one's own egomania. If he wants to be the show-biz mom of secularism, Bravo has a TV show just for him (except that, though campy, he has little entertainment value).

Consider the bravery of the parents involved in Brown and any number of analogous cases. Consider the brattiness of Mr Newdow. America ain't what it used to be. At times, that is a good thing. Not here.

The law may be an ass.
Mr Newdow is a half-ass.

 

I guess the newspapers are trying to suggest that the Court did what it did based on technical legal considerations, as opposed to revealing its opinions on the wider religio-political issues that most interest the public.

But yeah, the word 'technicality' does kind of falsely suggest 'triviality'.

 

It's not going to be a very popular opinion on this board, but I'm inclined to agree with Tom.

I guess that a great deal depends on how this phrase "under God" is interpreted, on what it actually means.

Personally, I've never been particularly bothered by the words "under God" in the pledge, interpreting them in kind of a Tillich-style manner as meaning something like "ultimate principle". So I've always kind of shrugged the phrase off as little more than a statement that America is an idealistic place, that it stands for whatever people think of as best.

But if the phrase is interpreted as referring to a particular deity and by implication to a particular religious tradition where belief in that deity is found, then I don't see how it could avoid being an establishment of religion and hence unconstitutional.

 

The Logic of the Supreme Court

Interesting comentary from Liberty University's Law School Dean.

http://www.liberty.edu/Academics/Law/index.cfm?PID=5054

 

News Media

I agree - it’s exactly what I thought as I read a few news reports of the Supremes opinion. Reuters, AP and the other wire services were the worst offenders along with some newspapers. TV and radio news stories screw up most often.

Reporters and news writers are supposed to be professional wordsmiths, but at times they seem more concerned with a hip or creative phrase rather than the correct term. The teasers for TV news are the worst. It's not a Left Wing or Right Wing thing, they all do it.

With legal issues, the news organizations that have reporters or writers who are also attorneys or interview some attorneys as part of the story tend to be the best. The law is exact and hip phrases don't work.

I hope a meatier case goes up to the Supremes. With a new case and facts and issues that are focused, sides could change.

 

Ah, it's good to be the moderator. You can say whatever you want and get away with it.






Tom Nixon

 

People have said worse about me, and I let it stay. There are a number of people who vehemently disagree with me, and I don't ban them.

Say what you want, but you'll always know where I stand on an issue.

 

This is the type of issue the Court likes to avoid. Both sides have loyal supporters and defendable arguments.

In future cases, look for them to adopt a "no harm, no foul" decision.

Will removing the "St." from cities such as "St Louis" be next?

 

David Boyd,

You'll LIKE living in "Ana California"!

 

Yes, I never considered "Santa." Half of California would need to be re-named.

 

Next we'll have to stop using religiously derived first names. No more David. No more Janko. No more Thomas. We can just use numbers, as the Romans did with girl babies.

David (while I can still call you that), did you get my PM?

/s/ Janko (for now)

 

I think that this is an establishment-clause issue.

People's names are obviously their own choice (or rather their parents'), and have nothing to do with government establishing a state religion. That objection is just silly.

City names are a little more problematic. But I suppose that cities received their names for historical reasons. There is no suggestion that their inhabitants must recognize any deity or religious tradition as a condition of living in them. I imagine that there are already cities out there with names derived from non-Christian religion. (Hawaiian and American Indian names, Greek names etc.)

But the pledge of allegiance is exactly that: a pledge of allegiance. If it requires that childen (and adults) pledge allegiance not only to the Republic, but in so doing acknowledge the existence and the ultimate authority of a particular religion's god, then it becomes a religious prayer as well as a patriotic oath. And the government prescription of a prayer, of a deity and, by implication, of the religious tradition that worships that particular deity, would appear to me to be a clear and obvious example of the establishment of religion.

 

There is nothing "required". No one has to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, it's totally voluntary.

What I find most ironic is that this country was founded by men like Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Hancock, who were all very religious. Their vision of government is now under assault by "men" like Michael Newdow, who want to destroy that type of society while invoking the very freedoms guaranteed them by that society.

 

No, it's not silly. It was a parody.

I don't think it's a prayer. Here's why. The phrase "under God" is a descriptive phrase. Whatever God is intended (and your guess is as good as mine) is not actually addressed, but inventoried, rather like a piece of furniture or a box of golfballs.

Here's another experiential reason it's not a prayer. Bill, as you may or may not know, my religious denomination is very very strict about absolutely no ecumenical worship services, joint masses, or prayers of any kind with those with whom we are not in total doctrinal agreement. This runs all the way to grace at meals, who can play a musical instrument in a wedding, if you attend a service in another denomination you sit respectfully but you do not actually participate by singing or praying, and all sorts of casuistry that are not relevant here. I understand that this will appear very strange to most American religionists, but here's my point: we have never--despite being extremely dubious about BOTH the older civil-religious AND the current militantly secular tone of public schools--found anything objectionable in our children reciting the pledge, either before or after the introduction of the phrase "under God." Now, if a whole platoon of gimlet-eyed Churman Lutran seminary professors over a period of more than fifty years, who do get cranked up over the least little breach of the no-joint-prayer standpoint, never had a problem with the pledge as a prayer, it's probably not a prayer.

Might the phrase be objectionable to some as an allusion? Sure. But I don't think it can be called a prayer in any meaningful sense--unless it's a prayer to the flag as an object of worship. But that's a whole nuther issue.

 

Uncle,

Us Americans already HAVE an official, unique, mandatory identification number, assigned by a benevolent government FREE OF CHARGE before our first birthdays. What a deal!

So all we really need to do is abandon the outdated, confusing, ambiguous, inefficient, religiously suspect use of "names" in favor of numbers in ALL areas of life!

 

We may as well as the reason we have names is so we can be taxed. Commoners didn't used to commonly have two names or fixed names.