Wednesday, July 03, 2002

In Support of Dr. Newdow

My mom is recovering nicely -- but is stuck at home for an extended recupperation.

Aware of my interest in the Pledge controversy and falling solidly into the same camp on the issue, she has forwarded me tons of commentary.

So here are the links along with some snippets...

Teachers and the Flag Taking the Pledge by Michael Yates

For two weeks our son sat quietly at his desk during the pledge. Then we received a phone call from his teacher-team leader who left a message for us to contact her about a problem with our son. We could not reach her that day, and she did not return our calls. We worried about what our son had done.

When he came home, he told us that his team leader was angry that he would not stand for the pledge. She had walked by his home room, seen that he was not standing, marched in and confronted him. When he refused to stand, she grabbed him by the arm and pulled him out of the room.

I was so incensed that I ranted for three days, but we let it go because she did not do it again. Then, she called a second time.

Could I speak with my son about his refusal to stand? He was setting a bad example for the other students.

I asked her if maybe my son wasn't setting a good example by showing his classmates that we live in a free country, where people must respect differences. I told her that one of the reasons that we sent our children to the urban public schools was so that they would get to know children of different racial and cultural backgrounds and respect differences. If the teachers themselves did not respect differences among their students, then weren't we all in a lot of trouble?

Finally, I reminded her that my son could not be legally required to stand for the pledge. In a distant voice, she said, Okay, she'd let it drop. I said goodbye, and she said, "Have a nice day."

We wasted a lot of energy trying to uphold our sons' right to peacefully refuse to salute a flag in a public school classroom. We were surprised by the persistence of the teachers, and amazed and saddened by the ironies which abound here. Our younger son's antagonist was a black woman teaching in a school which had an overwhelmingly black student body. Their parents were, for the most part, poor, and they lived in neighborhoods ravaged by underemployment, substandard housing, drugs, gangs, and the highest rates of infant mortality in the nation. They faced the same brutal discrimination faced by all black persons, and their prospects were bleak. Would it been too much to expect her to have seen the hypocrisy of the pledge of allegiance with its propaganda of "liberty and justice for all"? How could any black person believe this, let alone pledge allegiance to it?

Flag saluting and the nationalism of which it is a vital part are perfect vehicles to produce the docile persons the system needs. They teach that obedience is more important than thinking. Someday students will have to obey their employers. Someday they will have to march off to war. What better way to get them ready than to make them pray to the flag everyday?

Constitutional crossroads: Where 'under God' meets 'justice for all' Inside the First Amendment By Kenneth A. Paulson

That 1892 pledge was published in The Youth’s Companion magazine and quickly caught on in the nation’s schools. Never hesitant to make patriotism mandatory, by 1935 40 state legislatures had passed laws requiring recitation of the pledge.

This posed a problem for young Jehovah’s Witnesses who objected to saluting the flag on religious grounds. The mandatory pledge was challenged in court, leading to a U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding its constitutionality in 1940. By a vote of 8 to 1, the Court ruled that the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ freedom of religion had to give way to a national need for unity and patriotism.

Then a horrifying series of events changed the Court’s mind. During the months following the decision, there were more than 300 physical attacks on Jehovah’s Witnesses, including an assault in Richwood, W.Va., where the sheriff had nine Witnesses tied together and placed before a flagpole. A mob surrounded the group, recited the Pledge of Allegiance, and spat on the victims before driving them out of town.

The vehemence of these attacks and public criticism prompted three justices to say they had reached the wrong conclusion.

In 1943 the Court reversed itself, ruling that government may not compel students to say the Pledge of Allegiance. It was a victory for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

The Pledge of Allegiance by Cheryl Taylor

I stood next to a men who said, "This just handed the Republicans a landslide in November. I can't believe those liberal Democrats." Correct me if I am wrong, I explained, that Circuit Judge Goodwin, was a Nixon appointee and a Republican. He was joined by Circuit Stephen Reinhardt, a Carter appointee in this decision. There was nothing partisan about this ruling. He also said, "That his father in WW II and himself in the Gulf War, did not fight to see this." I again corrected him, "There were two world wars fought without 'under God' in Pledge of Allegiance and my husband also defended the Constitution for 23 years in the Navy."

Is God so small he needs a Pledge for validation? By Tony Norman

What god do they want us to pledge allegiance to? The god on the back of our money? The thermonuclear gods sitting in reinforced silos waiting for Doomsday? A god that would prefer that we were all enslaved to a pledge that has little or nothing to do with the spiritual lives of 275 million potential adherents? Is this a god worth demolishing constitutional protections and guarantees for?

Forcing Kids to Pledge Allegiance to the State By Brian Carnell

Barry is an ex-Marine officer who was infuriated to see children in a Virginia school goofing off and ignoring the morning recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Barry told Scripps Howard that he was so angry he wanted to send the kids to a Marine boot camp to instill the proper patriotism (quite a strange way to reinforce the Pledge's message of "liberty and justice for all.") Instead he introduced his bill that in his words "mandate[s] respect for the flag."

When the Virginia Senate modified his bill to allow for religious and philosophical exemptions, he quickly withdrew it calling those who had changed his bill "pinkos." That's an odd statement considering that the Pledge itself was written by socialist Francis Bellamy (cousin of the famous socialist Edward Bellamy, author of the classic utopian socialist novel Looking Backward).

Only in the United States would a conservative Republican be stridently pushing for American children to recite a statist loyalty oath written by a 19th century socialist.

What if the Pledge of Allegiance is an Ideal, Not Reality? by Deborah Mathis

For We the People to order allegiance to the Almighty goes against the primordial principle that, in the collective, we will not tinker with a man, woman or child's religion or lack thereof.

The Founding Fathers Were Not Christians By Chris Helms, Texas Tech University

Because the conservatives base their arguments on the subjective mysticism of religion, they will never have the intellectual ammunition needed to defeat liberals in a rational argument.

posted by Bohica at 4:12 PM