The Pledge

Today it was announced that the U.S. Supreme Court threw out an atheist's lawsuit challenging the Pledge of Allegiance in government schools.

At issue, ostensibly, was the ‘godless' gentleman's objection to his daughter's compulsory recitation of the words "under God." Fair enough. Seems simpler (and less costly) for the young lady to have remained silent while her peers enunciated those two words than for her father (and all his lawyer friends) to raise such a ruckus. But lawyers need to eat, too, I suppose.

That's not to say I'm personally 100% pleased with The Pledge -- but my beef is with the word after that otherwise innocuous "under God" clause: indivisible.

That one word says volumes about the transformation the U.S. has undergone, thanks, in no small part, to the outcome of the Civil War.

While the popular (and oversimplified) myth persists that the Civil War was fought primarily to end slavery, the facts of history (for those willing to examine them) bear witness to a much bigger picture, involving economic coercion via government power, among other things. The largely industrialized North was using the federal government's taxation power to the disadvantage of the largely agricultural South. For lack of fair rules, the southern States chose to opt out of the game.

Slavery was peaceably eliminated in numerous other nations during the same era. The same would have been America's inevitable destiny, had federal power not been invoked to shield northern industry from economic reality. President Lincoln only played the ‘slavery' card after the crisis was already well underway, in order to rally sufficient volunteers towards what was to become America's bloodiest armed conflict.

Each individual State embraced membership among the United States on a voluntary basis. It logically follows that -- in the absence of any explicit, pre-existing constitutional prohibition to the contrary -- each State likewise remains free to secede from the union on a likewise voluntary basis, should the people of that State see fit to do so.  The federal victory has since been consistently construed to suggest that secession -- on any basis -- is simply not allowed.

So now the Pledge of Allegiance (which, incidentally is not a definitive legal document as are the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution) effectively propagandizes us from our earliest years at government schools with the word "indivisible" -- the actual Constitution (i.e., the Law of the Land), the People, and the States themselves, notwithstanding.

There may well come a day in the not too distant future when the American People again rightly esteem the principles embodied in the U.S. Constitution, and dispense with petty debates about "The Pledge" and "under God." The constitutional abuses of the federal government have only increased exponentially in the years since the Civil War. May the American People soon wake up and put their servant government back in its constitutionally defined place.

Otherwise we -- and our progeny -- will remain the servants.