Lemon Pledge

The content of this seventeen-year-old article is every bit as relevant to the problems we face today as it was when it was written, and for the same reasons.

Publication: The Columbus Dispatch;Date: Mar 1, 2004;Section: Forum;Page: 7

Reciting Pledge of Allegiance problematic in a modern light

    Let's talk about the Pledge of Allegiance. How much do you really know about it? I dare say few of us left school without being introduced to the national anthem's Francis Scott Key. Yet most of us recited the pledge at the start of every school day without knowing much about its provenance.

    This year, in a case that has generated more raw emotion than a Jimmy Swaggart repentance, the u.S. Supreme Court will determine whether the pledge is constitutionally viable. Michael Newdow, a father, lawyer and atheist, challenged the recitation of the pledge in his young daughter's public-school classroom.

    Newdow objects to the words under God, claiming, logically, that the phrase is an expression of religious conviction – a belief in a deity – and therefore violates the separation of church and state. Amazingly, a federal appellate court agreed: and the government's appeal is set for argument before the Supreme Court on March 24.

    There is no getting around the historical fact that the phrase under God was intended as an overt statement of religious belief. It was inserted by Congress in 1954, 62 years after the pledge was written, purposely to proclaim the United States as a believer nation, in sharp contrast to the official atheism of the Soviet Union.

    An intellectually honest court would say that professing a belief in a deity as part of a daily ritual in our public schools violates the Bill of Rights. However, if the high court required the words under God to be excised, the resulting political uproar would lead to the passage of a pledge-protection constitutional amendment faster than you could say Tom DeLay.

    Either way, this is not going to end well for liberty.

    So, here's my modest proposal: Stop directing schoolchildren to say the pledge or any rote recitation of national fealty, not because of the roiling under-God debate, but because loyalty oaths are a backward approach to generating allegiance and are beneath us as a nation.

    Instead we should be imbuing young people with a thoroughgoing understanding of our founders' vision, and investing in civics classes that teach the meaning of liberty and justice for all and how this country, sometimes fitfully, expanded individual rights and the franchise to all its citizens.

    That is how you inspire loyalty. Daily oaths and pledges of allegiance are for nations that don't have as much to be proud of as ours. We have freedom: we don't need a pledge.

    There is another reason why we should retire the pledge: Francis Bellamy, its author. Bellamy penned the simple prose in 1892 as part of a quadricentennial celebration of Columbus Day. But there are many aspects of Bellamy's thinking that would be uncomfortable to 21st century Americans.

    He was an avowed socialist, whose thoughts were very much in line with his more famous cousin, Edward Bellamy, the author of Looking Backward, 2000-1887. Published in 1888, the novel describes the United States in the year 2000 as a nation transformed into a command economy, in which every adult is enlisted in the nation's industrial army. There is no private enterprise. Goods are obtained through the government with the use of ration cards. And everyone is granted the same annual"income." In the Bellamys' view, this socialist vista was utopia.

    Francis Bellamy's pledge also prescribed a "military salute" to accompany its recital. Originally, there was no hand upon one's heart; rather, the flag salute resembled that adopted by the nazis: right hand straight out, level with the forehead, palm down. As the words were said, the palm was to be turned up toward the flag.

    Old pictures of students striking this pose don't generate the warmth typically associated with seeing young people express their love of country; instead they are chilling reminders of the danger of blind loyalty.

    Bellamy's pledge may have sounded like an ode to equal justice, but he was a bigot himself. As editor of the magazine, The Illustrated American, he wrote editorials denouncing southern European immigrants: "A democracy like ours cannot afford to throw itself open to the world," he wrote in 1897. "Where every man is a lawmaker, every dull-witted or fanatical immigrant admitted to our citizenship is a bane to the commonwealth. Where all classes of society merge insensibly into one another every alien immigrant of inferior race may bring corruption to the stock."

    This is the man to whom American schoolchildren essentially pay homage every morning by reciting his words.

    Ending the pledge is obviously a nonstarter in a country that busts a gasket when even a small adjustment, such as returning the pledge to its original text, is suggested. Apparently, you are not a patriot unless you believe that government employees should lead schoolchildren every morning to profess a belief in God and declare how this nation loves liberty. Who says this country suffers from a dearth of irony?

    Robyn Blumner writes for Tribune Media Services.