Goodbye Pledge of Allegiance
Published by marco on
When I was younger and still in middle school, as it’s called these days, I began to wonder about the Pledge of Allegiance. I didn’t have well-worked out ideological reasoning for disliking it, it just rubbed my rebellious nature the wrong way. What was this pledge I was forced to take every day in a supposedly free nation? It smacked of a fanatic level of control, though that too was only vaguely expressed or felt at the time, to be honest. Regardless of the vague and unsubstantiated nature of my ideas, I still decided at that time that I would no longer say it.
This drew the collective derision of many of my ‘homeroom’ teachers (homeroom is the first class one goes to at the beginning of school in the U.S., during which announcements are made, but no actual teaching is done). After a while, some of the strange stares from classmates became looks of realization that they, too, didn’t have to say the pledge. Now, over a decade after leaving high school entirely, the pledge has finally been killed off as “unconstitutional”.
The New York Newsday’s Court: Pledge of Allegiance Unconstitutional reports that “A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that the Pledge of Allegiance is an unconstitutional endorsement of religion and cannot be recited in schools.”
The fact that the pledge is the chant of a fanatic pledging allegiance daily to a nation, breeding unquestioning consent into the nation’s youth from 5 years old onward doesn’t pose a problem. It was, after all, voluntary, though that didn’t stop most school districts and teachers from giving the impression that it was obligatory. The problem was that it was a “[a] profession that [the U.S. is] a nation ‘under God’”. This one line causes a problem with the separation of church and state since:
“…the school district is nonetheless conveying a message of state endorsement of a religious belief when it requires public school teachers to recite, and lead the recitation of, the current form of the pledge.”
The wording of the ruling does not seem to preclude a new pledge being put into place, perhaps with more specific wording vis-a-vis smiting all enemies of the U.S. and so on. It would still be voluntary, though, and hopefully, there will still be kids that elect not to say it.