Post by RS Davis on Mar 15, 2004 0:33:11 GMT -5
[glow=red,2,300]Garry Reed Wrote:[/glow]I'm constantly amazed at how everyone keeps getting this whole Pledge of Allegiance thing wrong. So why should I be any different? The fundamental issue has nothing to do with freedom of religion or freedom of speech or even its socialist source. It has everything to do with freedom, period. So here goes.
The flag flap flutters around whether our public school kiddies should stand and mindlessly mumble their way through a sequence of syllables that contains the phrase "under God." Fundamentalists want it so. They insist that those two little words have nothing to do with the Constitutional injunction against a state-established religion, and that we're a Judeo-Christian country, so the phrase stays. But libertarians and other freedom fans hiss and boo. Take one Bob Zaslavsky, my "community columnist" panel-mate on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, for example, who reminds us that many of our founders, like Jefferson and Franklin and Paine, were not really "Christians" but "deists," and that "The influences that shaped the founding of our nation are Greco-Roman, not Judeo-Christian – derived from Athens and Rome, not from Jerusalem." Therefore, purge the words. All good stuff for the history buff in me, but ultimately irrelevant.
Writing on Lew Rockwell.com, Bob Wallace doesn't stop at the "under God" line but takes on all 31 words. The pledge is socialist propaganda, he says, written by one Francis Bellamy who thought it would be a truly wondrous thing if all school children could be made into state-controlled Muppets. And Rex Curry, an exception to the "first kill all the lawyers" rule (he's a litigator for the libertarian Institute for Justice) likes to collect pre-WWII photos of American school kiddies proclaiming their pledges with Nazi-like raised arm salutes.
The flag flap flutters around whether our public school kiddies should stand and mindlessly mumble their way through a sequence of syllables that contains the phrase "under God." Fundamentalists want it so. They insist that those two little words have nothing to do with the Constitutional injunction against a state-established religion, and that we're a Judeo-Christian country, so the phrase stays. But libertarians and other freedom fans hiss and boo. Take one Bob Zaslavsky, my "community columnist" panel-mate on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, for example, who reminds us that many of our founders, like Jefferson and Franklin and Paine, were not really "Christians" but "deists," and that "The influences that shaped the founding of our nation are Greco-Roman, not Judeo-Christian – derived from Athens and Rome, not from Jerusalem." Therefore, purge the words. All good stuff for the history buff in me, but ultimately irrelevant.
Writing on Lew Rockwell.com, Bob Wallace doesn't stop at the "under God" line but takes on all 31 words. The pledge is socialist propaganda, he says, written by one Francis Bellamy who thought it would be a truly wondrous thing if all school children could be made into state-controlled Muppets. And Rex Curry, an exception to the "first kill all the lawyers" rule (he's a litigator for the libertarian Institute for Justice) likes to collect pre-WWII photos of American school kiddies proclaiming their pledges with Nazi-like raised arm salutes.
- Rick#nosmileys
