I pledge reluctantly to the symbol
Of the divided nation of America
And to the court system for which now controls
One population, under judicial domain
With rendered immunity and judicial discretion for some. by Art Francis, Issaquah, Washington
Posted on 07/02/2002 9:08:04 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
Last week's Ninth Circuit Court decision regarding the unconstitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance has drawn well-deserved fire from many quarters.
It was also a chance for political demagogues from both sides of the aisle to jump on the red-white-and-blue bandwagon and show their electorate just what stars and stripes, Yankee-doodle-dandies represent them in Washington.
The fact that this spontaneous "patriotic outburst" on the Capitol steps was performed by the same men who routinely oppress taxpayers and treat the office of public service as the American version of royal peerage is conveniently overlooked. On this day they were standing up for America.
The court's ruling produced a visceral reaction in most Americans, even those who usually could not care less about judicial proceedings.
Just as when in 1964 Justice Potter Stewart did not attempt to put a fine legal point on the definition of pornography (saying that he knew it when he saw it), so the American public didn't need to hear a legal reasoning for something that they innately knew was silly, stupid and wrong.
When the water-cooler conversations were not heaping scorn upon the tribunal's decision, a second and more salient question was being asked by most Americans: How did we in this nation get to the point where the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional?
And though it might seem heretical to say, the seeds of that court decision were sown by the very words of the Pledge itself.
Written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, the Pledge first appeared in the September 8th issue of The Youth's Companion, one of the most popular magazines of the era. Bellamy was a Baptist minister in Boston (eventually deposed by his flock), but also an outspoken Socialist.
When not lauding the ideas of a planned economy, social equality and the redistribution of wealth, Francis was swapping ideas with his equally Socialist cousin, and writer of utopian novels, Edward Bellamy.
To say that Francis Bellamy's idea of America was not in lockstep with that of the Founding Fathers is rather akin to saying that Lenin and Czar Nicholas didn't always see eye to eye. It is also important to remember that it was not this sometime holy man who placed the contentious (to certain federal judges) phrase "under God" into the Pledge. That honor belongs to the lobbying efforts of the Knights of Columbus in 1954.
The adjective that Bellamy did place into the Pledge that is telling is "indivisible."
To Bellamy's credit, he was a man who was in touch with the zeitgeist of his age. He not only took a shine to Socialism, the international rage among all "thinking men," but he also subscribed to a new form of American history -- founded upon what politicians found expedient rather than the historical record itself.
So much of this revision was perpetuated in the myth-making by and about Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln's wartime propaganda hinged on the idea that the Union was indissoluble. Honest Abe and his cohorts threw out the fact that several times during the Jefferson and Madison administrations the New England states had threatened secession. The matter was publicly debated and at no time did any party ever question the right of states to leave the Union.
Like Stalinist Russia's doctored "official" photographs (where individuals who had fallen into disfavor with the leader simply disappeared from the frame and from society!), Lincoln simply dismissed his nation's history for political purposes, whether noble or not.
So also the Ninth Circuit dismissed the fact that the word "Creator" appears in the founding documents of this nation. Like-minded activist courts have called upon the Jeffersonian phrase of a "wall separating Church and State" as an elucidation of the meaning of the Constitution. They dismiss the fact that Jefferson was not at the Constitutional Convention but at the time was serving as ambassador to France.
The court ruling in favor of Michael Newdow hinges on the idea that his daughter, who was not compelled in any way to say the Pledge, was somehow offended by the use of the words "under God." Like so many other implicit "rights" created in the past four decades, the right not to be offended was affirmed.
Is it not ironic that this "right not to be offended" that momentarily struck down the Pledge is the same pretext used to call for the banishment of Confederate images and a continued denial of the politically inconvenient facts of American history? As our national historical consciousness dims, so do our freedoms seem as twilight.
O Lincoln, what hast thou wrought?
(C.T. Rossi comments on contemporary culture for the Free Congress Foundation.)
Free Congress Foundation
I pledge reluctantly to the symbol
Of the divided nation of America
And to the court system for which now controls
One population, under judicial domain
With rendered immunity and judicial discretion for some. by Art Francis, Issaquah, Washington
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