The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held today (text of opinion here) that the 1954 statute adding the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional and that the state may not require the recitation of the Pledge in schools.



State law had required that teachers lead the recitation of the pledge, not that schoolchildren themselves recite it. The court ruled that the words of the Pledge were essentially normative and not descriptive and that its recitation in the presence of dissenting children (or in the presence of children of dissenting parents) was itself a coercive affront to their religious beliefs and was therefore unconstitutional.



The logic of the opinion would seem also to outlaw in schools any corporate recitation of the Declaration of Independence with its reference to "Nature and Nature's God" and "endowed by their Creator." Pushed further, of course, the court has come close to saying that government-run schools may not pursue normative instruction without heightened scrutiny from the courts, that only descriptive instruction will presumptively pass Constitutional muster. Education in the full sense would then become an almost impossible enterprise. And the Public Square would indeed be naked.



And why so many intelligent men and women, jurists or not, cannot understand the distinction between a recognition of the existence and sovereignty of God and a distinctive expression of fealty to God through a particular religious system --- for those scoring at home, it's government establishment of the latter, not acknowledgement of the former, that the Constitution proscribes --- well, that inability to make distinctions will remain unexplained.





God Bless America