Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. - Albert Einstein

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

As I’ve said many times, I will always do my best to avoid mixing religion and politics. The combination of the two can get very messy, as we’ve seen when Lee takes on the Christian-Conservative faction of the party. Beliefs in both of the sectors can easily cross lines and provide for a difficult situation to deal with. However, it looks like we won’t have to worry about that in California anytime soon, since the Pledge of Allegiance has been declared unconstitutional.

Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools is unconstitutional, a federal court judge ruled today, saying that the pledge’s reference to “under God” violated school children’s right to be “free from a coercive requirement to affirm God.”

The suit is the second by Sacramento atheist Michael Newdow, who has been trying for five years to remove the pledge from public classrooms.

You know what I think about this? If you don’t want to say “under God” while reciting the Pledge, then don’t. There doesn’t have to be a legal ruling in order for this to be declared. The article continues with a history of the Pledge, and where the line that made the entire thing unconstitutional came from.

The original pledge, which did not include the words “under God,” was written by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister’s son, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in America. Congress enacted the pledge in 1942.

The phrase was added in 1954 by legislation that recognized a belief that “from the time of our earliest history our peoples and our institutions have reflected the traditional concept that our nation was founded on a fundamental belief in God,” according to the House Report accompanying its passage.

California law requires that public elementary schools conduct “appropriate patriotic exercises” at the beginning of the school day.

And that’s it. In no way is the Pledge stating that you must believe in God, or else you’re going to burn in hell and face thousands of years of fire and brimstone being shoved up your rectum. That’s not the case. If you want, you can simply avoid saying those words if you don’t feel like it. And for that matter, I can name a ton of religions that believe in God, from Christianity to Buddhism, and Islam to Zoroastrianism. The title of God is not defined in the Pledge, and I don’t believe it’s stated anywhere that the God being referred to is the Christian God that the left seems to have a problem with lately.

The biggest problem I see with this is that another crazy, fringe minority has won a battle, thus forcing the rest of us to abide by their ways. This is the same as the people who support illegal immigration, which is just a small, if not almost unrecordable percentage of people in the United States. Unless you read blogs and are politically active, you wouldn’t realize that these people exist. The same goes for the pro-communists - unless you actively search for them, you’re not going to find them. However, what we’re seeing is a small group of people who get their way almost constantly, while the rest of us are left spinning our wheels and tossing mud.