The Pledge...Ruled Unconstitutional..

[marionette]

I found this off of a site:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/bush/story...744753,00.html



America's pledge of allegiance ruled unconstitutional

Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
Thursday June 27, 2002
The Guardian

An appeal court has ruled that the pledge of allegiance in the US is unconstitutional because it contains the words "under God". The pledge may no longer be recited in schools.
In a ruling that has already provoked a furious reaction, the 9th US circuit court of appeals in San Francisco over turned the 1954 act of Congress which inserted the phrase "under God" after the words "one nation".

In a two-to-one decision the court said that the phrase violates the so-called establishment clause in the Constitution that requires a separation of church and state.

"A profession that we are a nation 'under God' is identical, for establishment clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation 'under Jesus', a nation 'under Vishnu', a nation 'under Zeus', or a nation 'under no god', because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion," concluded Judge Alfred T Goodwin in his written judgment for the three-judge panel.

The decision, made by the most liberal of the appeal courts in the US, is bound to lead to a further appeal and has already infuriated conservative Christians. The issue of the place of God in government is a highly charged subject in a country that is much more religious than Europe.

The case that led to the ruling was brought by an atheist whose daughter was ostracised after she had refused to say the pledge in full at her school in the Sacramento area. Children cannot be forced to say the oath.

The original pledge, written in 1892, did not contain the phrase; it was added later because of a rightwing religious lobby's efforts during the McCarthy era. The original pledge was written by a Baptist socialist minister, Francis Bellamy, and was first published in a magazine called the Youth's Companion. The magazine's editor had hired Bellamy after the latter had been sacked by his church for delivering controversial socialist statements from the pulpit.

It was more than 60 years later that Congress, at the height of the anticommunist McCarthy period, added the words "under God" following a campaign by the Knights of Columbus, a rightwing Catholic organisation.


...that's so stupid, in my opinion..