Should the people who believe the least define the most about
America’s public life? Yes, says the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of
Appeals. Its 2-1 ruling against the Pledge of Allegiance is a
stunning victory for a minority of malcontents determined to create
a nation under nothing.
“This is more about me than her,” said Michael Newdow, the
Sacramento atheist who brought the lawsuit against the Pledge of
Allegiance on behalf of his daughter. “Newdow acknowledged that he
is, in effect, using his daughter to support his cause,” reports
the Los Angeles Times. “He said as far as he knows, she
stands to recite the pledge along with her classmates in
school.”
Newdow, an ordained minister in the Universal Life Church
(ordination takes “less than three minutes,” reports the
Times), says that he had to pursue his cause through his
child because the courts didn’t listen to his earlier lawsuits
against America’s currency (“In God We Trust” annoys him) and
George Bush’s inauguration (Jesus Christ was mentioned). Newdow
certainly landed his latest suit in the right court.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is always happy to use a
Constitution written by theists to undo the values of theism. The
last thinkers that jurists like Stephen Reinhardt would consult
about the Constitution’s meaning are the men who wrote it. Would
the Constitution’s crafters find the Pledge of Allegiance
“unconstitutional”? Of course not. But since liberals cannot get a
majority of Americans to approve an atheistic Constitution, they
must mangle the old theistic one, twisting it to justify the total
separation of God from government. American school children, the
9th Circuit Court of Appeals tells us, enjoy an inalienable right
to not hear God mentioned in the Pledge of Allegiance. Where does
this right originate? In nature and nature’s God? No, it originates
in liberal jurists’ own minds and wills. In others words, it rests
not on God’s authority, but their own. But since they didn’t author
the universe, their authority is meaningless. The chutzpah they
display would be comic were it not so destructive.
Americans like Newdow — with the help of a judicial system that
specializes in breeding its own destroyers — are creating a nation
of nihilism from which the American founders would have fled. Had
they known the First Amendment would result in the suppression, not
the spread, of religion in public, they wouldn’t have written it.
And the states wouldn’t have signed it. The First Amendment was
written, after all, to protect their state religions against any
federal religion that could swoop down and crush them. The First
Amendment is now used not to protect the religious, but to
persecute them. In the hands of judicial activists, it establishes,
in effect, a federal religion of atheism which banishes from the
states any public expression of God. Atheism is welcome in public
schools. But God isn’t. This is as perverse as a parent who uses
his child as a battering ram against the Constitution. Most parents
don’t view God as a corrupting influence on their child. Mr. Newdow
does. His atheism is quite scrupulous. To hear God’s name in the
public square is a sin so serious he cannot let his daughter
indulge it.
Apparently she doesn’t mind the Pledge of Allegiance, and her
school never demanded she say it. But no matter: public schools
have no business potentially marginalizing her when her father can
marginalize her himself. Such is enlightened modern parenting.
Atheists complain about the tyranny of the majority. But they are
doing a pretty good impersonation of tyrants themselves. When the
only word forbidden in public schools is God’s name, it’s clear
that they define America far more than the theists who founded
it.
