If the
rules of English and sound reasoning are applied to the meaning of the
Constitution, then no other conclusion can be legitimately drawn. The presence of “under God” in the existing
Pledge is unquestionably unconstitutional.
The politicians, lawyers, and justices who serve the theocratic cause
may strive to convince us otherwise, but their grasp of English terminology is
not superior to my own. Where these
people are concerned, far too many brazenly seek to convince us that the words
of the Constitution and the phrase “under God” mean things altogether different
from what they actually do.
The words
of the First Amendment read, “no law respecting an establishment of
religion.” The phrase “no law” does not
admit of any exception. Deity
veneration is ecumenical to religion.
The term “God” denotes a singular, omnipotent, all-mighty deity to the
exclusion of all others. It could be
debated endlessly whether or not “God” or any other deity exists either by
virtue of the religions established for defining and worshiping them, or were
existent prior to and independent of the establishment of those religions. Since deities have no tangible physical
substance apart from the statues, paintings, symbols, signs, and names ascribed
to them, the issue cannot be decisively resolved one way or the other. In turn, the monotheistic notion of one almighty
supreme deity, versus multiple deities, versus no deities at all cannot be
proven one way or another either. What
seems evident is that doctrinal knowledge and/or worship of God
exists only by virtue of the religions that foster, embrace, and advocate God
as their object of veneration.
Regardless of the nebulous issues of whether “God” was a creator, the
creator, or just a myth created by the human architects of religion, worship of
“God” is still indisputably an establishment of religious doctrine. It follows that the display of artifacts
intended to designate, invoke, or venerate God cannot validly be exempt from
the mandates of the First Amendment, nor can the display of artifacts
designating or invoking some other deity.
Therefore, no laws are allowable that favor belief in God, which endorse
the name “God”, or that favors subscription to the monotheistic ideology that
characterizes God worship. Any law that
conscripts or compels belief in or acknowledgment of God, monotheism, or a
specific relationship to same, is unconstitutional by definition. In the case of the Justice Department and
its current leadership, this rather transparent fact was clearly under
dispute.
The issues
surrounding the “under God” pledge involve more than just the First
Amendment. The Sixth Article mandates that, "no religious test shall ever be
required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United
States". If no religious test is
required of any public servant, then it cannot be required of any other citizen
or of their children, and certainly not under the public trust. It follows that belief in “God” or any
other deity is not a requirement of citizenship in good standing. If this fact is not acknowledged as binding
legal truth and so stipulated by the courts from the onset, then consideration
of the issues at hand cannot possibly proceed with honor. If so stipulated, then it is equally as
undeniable that a pledge whose wording implies that belief in God is a
requirement, is unconstitutional for the government to endorse. The fact that people and their children are
“not required” to take the pledge does not dispel that fact. The wording of the pledge mandates allegiance
“under God”, and thus creates a public choice between taking it (pass) versus
dissenting against it (fail). Since no
religious test is required, then Washington clearly and unequivocally has no
business using a federal statute to support a pledge that amounts to one. It smacks of inquisition, it smacks of
witch-hunt, and blatant insurrection against the Supreme Law of this nation!
Throughout the Fernandez
dissenting opinion in the Ninth Circuit Court ruling and the subsequent Justice
Department appeal, there was an obsessive leaning on the evidence of “religious
heritage” to justify the presence of
“under God” in the pledge. As
shown above, the case in favor of God in the pledge has no standing on the
strict technical grounds of the First Amendment. Without the historical argument, they have no legitimate leg to
stand on. The case for “under God” thus
leans heavily on various other concessions to religion that was either properly
or improperly allowed, some of which have been long-standing. In other words, the argument boils down to
an appeal to special instances where the government relaxed strict enforcement
of the First Amendment to allow ceremonial use of terms like “God” or “Lord” in
official proceedings or in the singing of religiously slanted patriotic songs
during public occasions.” As the
argument goes, the use of ‘under God’ in the Pledge is consistent with those
other established ceremonial usages.”
Now, an established tradition in its own right, the phrase “under God”
should be allowed to remain in the Pledge.”
One of the divisive edges of the
Justice Department appeal amounted to the notion that if the Ninth Circuit
Court ruling did stand, then all patriotic songs with “God” in their lyrics
would be inadmissible as well. This
strategy parroted the dissenting opinion of Judge Fernandez. Although a technical potentiality, the
notion borders on the edge of inane.
For sixty-two years leading up to 1954, the pledge did not contain the
“under God” phrase, and the right to sing those patriotic songs was never under
dispute. If the Congress of 1954 and
President Eisenhower had not abused their legislative license by sanctioning
the “under God” pledge, then the notion of endangerment for the songs in
question would not possess even weak political substance.
The above is just one example among the many ways that theocracy
labors to confuse the issues. On top of
it, the “religious heritage” and “ceremonial deism” arguments suffer from a
profound defect of classification.
There is a very substantial difference between someone offering a
religious salutation or prayer as a peripheral act during a government or
public function, versus conscripting the nation’s core oath of allegiance to
the same end. Originally,
(prior to 1954) the pledge was unambiguously intended to focus a collective
moment or remembrance about our common nationality as US citizens irrespective
of what differences we have regarding matters of religion. Originally, Its intent was to foster a
spirit of allegiance to the Nation and its sacred principles of liberty and
justice. The pledge in its pre-1954 phraseology was a pure device
of ceremonial nationalism. Thereafter,
the pledge degraded into a religious loyalty oath by the imposition of a device
of “ceremonial idol worship”. Words are symbols, which are usable in
powerful and compelling ways, and tragically not always to the common
good. The imposition of the "under God" phrase confused the
centrally important issue of allegiance to Nation with the clearly more
arbitrary and personal issue of allegiance to deity and religious ideology.
The presence of "under God" explicitly mandates the
additional requirement of allegiance to a monotheistic idol and by common
implication, allegiance to the biblical theocracies that define and sustain
worship of God as their central establishment of religious practice.
Clearly, the presence of the words "under God" in the pledge, amount
to a government endorsement of a specific deity (God) and a specific kind of
religious theism (monotheism). Washington
does not have the right to prescribe, even as a ceremonial matter, how many
deities there are or are not, or prescribe allegiance to or under any of them,
because that is tampering with the “free exercise thereof”. By definition, the usage of the term “God”
is singular in its import, thus meaning only one. If it were otherwise, then the phraseology in the Pledge would be
“under the Gods”. The words tell no
lie; the phrase “under God” is an explicit mandate to allegiance under the
specter of a monotheistic religious idol.
True civil freedom cannot possibly exist without the uncensored
right to non-participation in idol veneration.
That constitutionally guaranteed entitlement must not be at the price of
exclusion from the collective sharing of national allegiance. Because of the imposition of the “under God”
phrase, five decades of school children have been coerced into believing they
cannot share in the ceremonial taking of allegiance to nation without also
supplicating beneath a monotheistic idol in the same breath. Without legitimate grounds for dispute, this
amounts to a government sanctioned impalement of the people and their children
on an exercise in idolatry. With all
due consideration for the issues, one should view the
ultimate consequences in the light of world history, old and new. The well worn saying, "those who refuse
to learn from history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them", is heard
screaming from the grave of the Italian scholar who first penned them.
Recall that slavery in times past was a way of life among the God
loving Bible thumping settlers of this nation.
Biblical doctrine all the way back to the Ten Commandments sanctions
slavery and even George Washington was a slave owner. Are we to shirk off or reinterpret the mandates of the Thirteenth
Amendment and return to those times in the name of satisfying religious
heritage? Perhaps we should repeal
woman’s suffrage in the service of the same male favored religious dogma. How much are we to believe we owe in the
name of enslavement to the dogmas of old world antiquity? The Constitution is an instrument of
protection and liberation from the tyranny of inequitable cultural, tribal, and
familial legacies, but particularly also from enslavement to the devices of
autocratic religion. The 1954 imposition
of the words “under God” runs counter to that explicit tenet, and therefore was
clearly a turn in a wrong direction.
It takes no special vision to realize that the clergy who preside
at government ceremonies are virtually all exclusive to the biblical faith, all
consecrated to a biblically mandated obsession to world domination. Further, when it comes to desecrating the
sacred shrines of other faiths and beliefs, both secular and religious, and
visiting inequity on their people, biblical theocracy has a rap sheet many
centuries long! Are matters of fact
about the obsessively exclusionary nature of the “religious heritage” involved
relevant to the case at hand? If they
are not, then appeals to so-called facts of religious heritage cannot possibly
carry currency either! The notion that
a bunch of songs and religious ceremonies with the term “God” embedded within
should trump the Constitution is ideologically degenerate and politically
irresponsible! The Pledge is our core
expression of national allegiance.
Therefore, it must be transcendent of any concession to religion
regardless of what has been allowed in other more peripheral instances. From the original foundation created by
Bellamy, the Pledge was exclusively intended as an affirmation of national
allegiance. To completely fulfill that
purpose the wording must not compromise the standards of religious neutrality
embodied by this nation’s Supreme Law.
The imposition of “under God” poisoned the common ground of our
nationalism in the service of selfish and power hungry theocratic interests.
Not only is the phrase
"under God" a government endorsement of monotheism, but also one that
amounts to a symbolic endorsement of the supremacy of the associated biblical
doctrine over the authority of the Constitutional itself. This is in undeniable conflict with the
Sixth Article, which mandates that the Constitution is the Supreme Law of this
nation. These simple facts show that
previous court judgments that endorsed “under God” as a permissible element in
our core ceremony of nationalism, are fundamentally flawed and thus untenable
by any legitimate standard.
Up until
1954, the Pledge proudly sustained a religiously neutral tradition of
allegiance. The corruption that ensured
thereafter was insurrection in the service of theocracy, one neither
constitutionally admissible nor universally accepted among the peoples of this
nation. Without doubt, past Presidents
and other notables have used the term "god" in their speeches to make
a political statement, and some concessions have been made in the service of
accommodating old world religious traditions.
However, some of those same notables were slave owners or had little
interest in civil parity between the genders, or non-discrimination between the
races. Are we to tolerate having the
Constitution either congressionally or judicially thrown in the trash to
elevate an artifact from an objectionable religious past to a place of
sovereign status in defiance of constitutional law?
The mere
fact that the term "god" has been around for a long time, does not
add up to special dispensation to inflict it on our government sanctioned oaths
and pledges. Without apology, the
notion is about the same as suggesting that because slavery had been a long
standing social disease, it should have been allowed to spread wherever it
wanted, and should have been allowed to remain where it was already
entrenched. The notion that it is
permissible to allow religion to entrench itself wherever it wants, is
irresponsible and dangerous regardless of who endorses the act! This rhetoric may be hard words to levy
against the popular religion, but anytime we hold any religion, or its
institutions and practitioners, popular or otherwise, to be beyond error, beyond
accountability, above the law, then we are in a very dangerous ground
indeed.
The
Justice Department appeal goes on to cite “our national motto (‘In God We
Trust’)” as further incidental justification for the “under God” in the pledge
(page 6). Wait a minute now; is “In
God We Trust” really our national motto?
Exactly when did it become the national motto? Was it in 1957? What was
the national motto before then? On the
Great Seal of the Nation we find the words “E Pluribus Unum”, a motto handed
down to us by the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John
Adams. It is a salutation of
pluralistic unity with roots from the earliest days of the Nation. The same phrase is on the Statue of Freedom
atop the Capitol Building and graces our money to this day. In fact, the use of “In God We Trust” on our
currency did not become a government-mandated idolatry until 1957, just three
years after the defacement of the Pledge.
Is this not another hostile eclipsing of a hard-won national heritage in
the service of power hungry religious interests?
The
ideological cancer embedded in the Department of Justice appeal ran ever
deeper. On page 4, the appeal states,
“In the first case, Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668 (1984), the
Supreme Court held that a city did not violate the Establishment Clause by
including a nativity scene as part of its Christmas display. In upholding the
Christmas display, the Court explained that ceremonial acknowledgments of our
nation's religious heritage, including the reference to God in the Pledge of
Allegiance, do not "establish a religion or religious faith, or tend to do
so."
Well of
course not. The act of establishment
(as the event of establishing) had occurred long prior. The quote amounts to a play on words, an
obfuscation. The core issue of the
Christmas display had nothing to do with a religion being “established” (as in
being created or founded). The First
Amendment establishment clause pertains just as equally to religions already
established as it does to religions in the process of being established. Both meanings fall under the auspices of
being “an establishment of religion”.
To suggest otherwise, even implicitly, is to do unconscionable abuse to
the meaning of the language and to the true import of the establishment
clause. The issue was not about
whether something was being established or not, but rather about the use of
government property to promote religious ideology. With this clarification in mind, both instances boil down to an
already established religion (the biblical faith) having its way with the
governmental trust. In other words, the
issue was one of the government allowing a religion (an establishment of
religion) a special concession. Can
Joe’s nudist retreat put up a display on government property during their
seasonal celebrations?
There is a
notable fly in the ointment. It could
be argued and evidently successfully in some instances that the “free exercise
thereof” would be impinged if display of a nativity scene on public grounds
were disallowed. What if some private
citizen resisted the display of the nativity scene on there own property? Would
there be any grounds for suit then?
Maybe the biblical right-wingers think there should be, but they would
face prosecution for trespassing if they attempted such a move. Why should it
be any different for the common ground of our public facilities?
For the
sake of argument, I might provisionally agree that forbidding the nativity
scene on public ground during the winter holidays is a little “picayune” in its
constitutional strictness. Still,
agreement even in this case, if at all, would require the stipulation that
analogous privileges are extended to the Native American religions, Wiccans,
Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc, during their holy days. Is such a universality of privilege an
actual government protected reality?
What legitimate exclusive need is there for anyone to set up any kind of
religious display on government ground?
The truth is that none exists.
The faithful are at liberty to use their church grounds or their own
private property for such purposes. No
legitimate civil injury ensues from prohibiting the peddling of religion on
government property. It simply puts the peddlers where they belong. That is, on the same playing field with the
rest of the religious persuasions, fair and just. Some people might go so far as to say that the wording of the
establishment clause is not strong enough to adequately deter against the
covetous encroachment of religion.
Still, the real error might not reside with the First Amendment, but
rather with the religious zealots who abuse the privilege of free exercise to
satisfy biblical dogma and its mandate to world domination. With little room for dispute, biblical
doctrine tends to promote obsessively autocratic and intrusive tendencies among
many of its practitioners.
Instances
like the ones above are significant.
Still, the presence of “under God” in the Pledge is a unique instance
that outweighs in significance the others by a huge order of magnitude. As before, the pledge is the Nation’s core
ceremony of allegiance, one that is invoked in our public schools and now even
in the halls of congress as a daily collective exercise. It is a primary device of ceremonial
nationalism, upon which no religious ideology no matter how popular has the
right to impose its mark. Nor does any
court in the land have the right to endorse or sanction such mark making. The government does not have the right to
snub off the sentiments of more than ten percent of the population to satisfy
factional theocratic interests, no matter how popular they are perceived to be.
It has
become all too convenient for people in influential circles to blow off
objections to the “under God” pledge and other religious oath tests. They declare them to be inconsequential
concessions to religion and thus fundamentally benign in their impact on human
ideation about matters of deity and religious belief. To take such notions seriously, as they should not, then we might
as well conclude that the legal mandates specified in the Constitution are only
impotent symbolic gestures that affect nothing in reality either. If it were truly the case, then how do we
explain the intense feelings and coercive posturing that occurred in Washington
and elsewhere in reaction to the Ninth Circuit Court ruling? How is a pro-pledge appeal from the Federal
Justice Department itself explained?
The Pledge of Allegiance case is a matter of litigation over the status
of a government-endorsed ceremony. The
role of the justice department is to enforce the law as determined by the
legislative process and confirmed by the courts. Its role is not to involve itself in disputes about what the law
is or what it should be. Therefore,
what legitimate official interest could the Justice Department possibly have in
a court dispute over the wording of the pledge? Considering his and President Bush’s right wing agenda, Attorney
General John Ashcroft’s vow to fight the Ninth Circuit Court ruling was not
surprising, but how does that justify using federal money and personnel
resources to carry it through?
In
ferreting out these “mysteries”, we cannot loose sight of one critical
historical fact. In spite of all the
pretenses about the importance of “religious heritage“, religion has not always
amounted to a positive force for the common good. The history of both the old world and the early American Colonies
is fraught with instances where the so-called “heritage” of religion was the
underlying cause of much oppression and tyranny. The very wording of the Constitution in its various articles and
amendments is rather indelible historical proof. This nation’s indebtedness to “religious heritage” is limited and
provisional at best. The real debt of
gratitude belongs to the Framers of the Constitution and to all the brave men
and women who subsequently gave the blood of their lives to preserve, protect,
and defend the sacred code of freedom that the Constitution embodies. We cannot, must not allow this nation’s
sacred heritage to be subverted by idolatrous indulgences in archaic and
exclusionary religious ideology.
The
biblical theocrats dearly want to extinguish all knowledge of their religion’s
negative impact on history. They want
us blinded to the historical reasons why the Constitution forbids government
entanglement with religion. They endeavor to convince us that their deity and
dogmas are the sole reasons this Nation has any worthy existence at all. One of the most salient contemporary myths
they peddle is that the “under God” ideology won the cold war and thus
delivered us from the evil specter of the communism. Undoubtedly, communism is
an adversary to the ways of capitalism and democracy and to civil and religious
freedom. Undoubtedly also, communism
did infiltrate twentieth centaury America to some degree and it was an
ideological tool of foreign powers that had to be reckoned with. Still, it does not follow that our national
ideology of civil and religious freedom was somehow in more jeopardy from
communism then it was from the totalitarian agenda of biblicalism. In the final analysis, the only difference
between communism and biblicalism is that the former intends to extinguish
religion altogether, while the latter intends to extinguish all license in
matters of religious belief and faith but its own.
Properly
enforced, the Sixth Article and First Amendment are guardian defenders against
either eventuality. Subversion of the
Constitution was never required to defense against communism, no more then it
was to defense against Nazism. It is a
divisive, fear mongering theocratic snow job to suggest otherwise. Like the Second World War, the fundamental
constitutional values of liberty, equality, and justice, including religious
freedom, that provided the strength of belief that united the Nation and saw us
through the Cold War. Stated bluntly,
there is absolutely nothing democratic or pluralistic about biblicalism. Rather, it is the antithesis to both. During the cold war, the need to defense the
Nation and its sacred secular ideals from the divisive encroachment of yet
another totalitarian movement was real.
Even so, this did not justify a theocratic sacking of our government
while the nation turned to the task of defending its legitimate interests
against the Soviet Union.
Intense
lobbying during the 1950’s from the Knights of Columbus, a catholic lay
organization, eventually brought the “under God” pledge into being. When President Eisenhower signed the bill
that sealed it into federal statute, he was tragically in error to claim that
it would provide the Nation with “spiritual tools” that it allegedly previously
lacked. As discussed more fully later,
what it did do is inflict an insidious form of damage upon the spiritual and
intellectual integrity of the Nation.
Hand in hand with the creation of the “under God” pledge came the 1950’s
“red scare” witch-hunts led by Senator Joe McCarthy. This amounted to a tragic history of many loyal Americans
blacklisted and ruined. Their lives were ruined just because they knew someone
of proven or suspected communist leanings, or because they wouldn’t take the
“under God” pledge, or otherwise had religious or political views that ran
counter to the maniacally autocratic agenda of McCarthyism. As many others have pointed out, we managed
to press ahead rather well and win the Second World War on the strength of a
religiously neutral pledge and thus without recourse to a government mandated
supplication under a monotheistic idol.
All this accomplished in spite of the Vatican’s less then sterling
politics during the Nazi rise to power.
It is also notable that Washington in the grip of “God” managed to
entangle this nation in an ill conceived, decade long, and extremely costly
crusade in Vietnam. A crusade that
resulted in the worst military defeat in our history. Now, forty years later there is the additional issue of the
September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and all the
various underlying events all played out under the specter of the monotheistic
overlord.
PART THRE
E
Particulars