AMID the wall-to-wall media coverage of Hurricane Katrina and John Roberts' Supreme Court nomination, one secondary news item merits significant attention: The declaration by a federal judge that the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional. This ruling is not only inconsistent with America's tradition and heritage; it is illogical and tramples on the rights of the majority while overly compensating for the minority view. It also contradicts case precedent established with respect to religion in civic life.
Last Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton of San Francisco decided that the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance invalidated the rights of school children to be "free from a coercive requirement to affirm God." This may sound like déjà vu; in June 2002 the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California ruled that these words were unconstitutional and disallowed the repetition of them in public schools under its jurisdiction.
This current suit, just like the last, is brought forth by atheist Michael Newdow, who protested the words "under God" because he claimed that they went against his daughter's beliefs. In actuality, the young girl is a Christian and attends Sunday school with her mother, who has custody of her. If you recall, the constitutionality of the Pledge was not determined by the U.S. Supreme Court last year because the suit was dropped on a custody technicality. This time, Newdow filed a lawsuit on behalf of three unnamed parents and theirchildren.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle were furious with Karlton's ruling; the Senate unanimously passed a non-binding resolution the day after Karlton's ruling, stating that "one nation under God" is "a fully constitutional expression of patriotism" and represents the importance of religious faith in our country's founding.
Our nation has a strong element of religious heritage; religion is present in many aspects of daily life. It is not illegal for God to be mentioned in the public square; rather, it is the establishment of religion by the government that is unconstitutional. The whole basis for the separation of church and state was not to rid society of all faith-based undertones; it was to prevent the government from interfering with, and perhaps controlling religious practices among its citizens, as well as to prevent the church from becoming dependent on the government. According to CNN, Judge Ferdinand Fernandez of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, who disagreed with his court's majority ruling back in June 2002, stated that phrases such as "under God" or "In God We Trust" have "no tendency to establish religion in this country." In his view, only those who "most fervently would like to drive all tincture of religion out of the public life of our polity" would disagree.
Fernandez also asserts that if we accept "Newdow's theory of our Constitution... we will soon find ourselves prohibited from using our album of patriotic songs in many public settings." This might be a bit extreme, and this has yet to come close to fruition on a large scale, but the principle of the conventional slippery slope argument is one that can't be ignored. What will be next after this? Attacks have already been launched on history lessons about the Declaration of Independence, William Penn's "The Frame of Government" and Samuel Adams' "The Rights of Colonists" in California's Cupertino Union School District, when one teacher last year was prohibited from teaching about the "religious content" of these documents.
The case precedent set forth in cases dealing with religion in public settings also favors the permanence of such religious existences. In 1989, in County of Allegheny v. ACLU, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a previous ruling with the opinion that the Pledge was "consistent with the proposition that government may not communicate an endorsement of religious belief."
The claim that the motto "In God We Trust," a statement inscribed on U.S. currency, is a government endorsement of religion, has been ruled in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 1970 and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in 1979 and dismissed by both the 10th Circuit Court and the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996 as unfounded.
A moment of silence was instituted permanently in public schools in Virginia as of April 1, 2000, and an ACLU challenge was unsuccessful in U.S. District Court and then dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001. U.S. District Judge Claude M. Hilton stated in his ruling, "The act was enacted for a secular purpose, does not advance or inhibit religion, nor is there excessive entanglement with religion ... Students may think as they wish -- and this thinking can be purely religious in nature or purely secular in nature."
Similarly, the act of saying "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is voluntary. No one is forced to participate. Since the overwhelming majority of citizens and students do believe in God and might be inclined to utter these words, why should they be barred from doing so? If the words "under God" were to be deemed unconstitutional, a tyranny of the minority -- those who prefer not to include those words -- would reign, and this would be a true violation of our right to freely exercise our religion.
Whitney Blake is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. She can be reached at wblake@cavalierdaily.com.
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