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To: Lane3 who wrote (15757)	6/27/2002 12:43:51 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

A generic two-word reference to God tucked inside a rote civic exercise is not a prayer. If this is not a prayer,then why the fuss? The idea that the words have lost their meaning would imply that the best solution is to just dump them from the affirmation of national loyalty. This argument is in conflict with the vigor with which it is presented. TP

To: Lane3 who wrote (15757)	6/27/2002 12:46:53 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

Had the judges stepped back from their law books and legal precedents and looked at the society in which this case appeared, they would have recognized that including the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance poses no danger to the First Amendment. Isn't that dangerous judicial action, interpreting laws instead of rote homage to the original authors of the pledge? What would Scalia do? TP

To: Lane3 who wrote (15757)	6/28/2002 2:11:36 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

Pledging Allegiance: Wrong for the Right Reasons By E. J. Dionne Jr. Friday, June 28, 2002; Page A29 My phone rang on May 19, 1988. Newt Gingrich, a young Republican firebrand who loved pointing out every weakness of every Democrat, was excited. He had found a 1977 veto message issued by Michael Dukakis, then the governor of Massachusetts and the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Dukakis had rejected a bill requiring students to recite the pledge of allegiance. Gingrich immediately grasped the political possibilities. "I would just love to see him explain on national television for three or four minutes why a bill requiring the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of a school day is unconstitutional," Gingrich said of Dukakis. "When the country realizes that the lawyers who advised him to veto that bill are the people he'd put on the Supreme Court, we've won the South." Later, the pledge was to become a centerpiece of George H.W. Bush's attacks on Dukakis as a "card-carrying ACLU liberal." But when I called Dukakis's aides that day for comment, I was struck by how dismissive they were. Dukakis, after all, was on strong constitutional ground in defending the rights of religious minorities who rejected the pledge. But what Gingrich grasped that Dukakis's lieutenants didn't was the deep resonance of patriotism and its traditional forms of public expression. And so, when a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2 to 1 to strike the words "under God" from the pledge as recited in public schools, my first reaction was: "Here we go again." This time, though, the Democrats weren't blindsided. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle labeled the decision "just nuts." Dick Gephardt, the Democratic leader in the House, said he saw "no reason to change the time-tested, venerable pledge." Yet nobody can say that the 9th Circuit majority was illogical. On the contrary, the two judges involved -- Democrats were grateful one was a Richard Nixon appointee -- could plausibly argue that their decision was consistent with earlier court rulings barring prayer and other forms of state-prescribed religious expression in public schools. Nor is the "under God" phrase all that venerable. While the first version of the pledge was written back in 1892 -- by a socialist, as it happens -- the reference to God was inserted by Congress only in 1954 at the request of President Eisenhower. Doing so, he said, would "strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country's most powerful resource in war and peace." Ike is also famous for having declared, "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply held religious belief -- and I don't care what it is." He might have been describing a constitutional doctrine, embraced by many liberals, known as "ceremonial deism." The idea is that references to God become meaningless if recited often enough in public places. Thus, you can argue that the two judges who knocked "under God" out of the pledge take religion far more seriously than their liberal critics. In trying to evade fights they suspect they would lose, liberals are essentially saying that public references to God are okay, as long as they are trivialized by long-term use. Personally, I like the pledge and its demand on behalf of "liberty and justice for all." And I wish that the 9th Circuit had not thrown a tattered issue so susceptible to demagoguery into this political year. But if liberals want to be intellectually honest and not just political in defending the use of "under God" in the pledge, they need a more robust argument than "ceremonial deism." If you think the 9th Circuit was wrong, you have to believe on principle that it's wrong to obliterate every public reference to God, whether on the currency or at the opening of Supreme Court sessions. The doctrine underlying such a view cannot be that public references to religion are unimportant. That takes neither religious people nor their critics seriously. There is only one viable principle for upholding the reference to God in the pledge. It would assert that we need to strike a balance between the rights of believers and the rights of nonbelievers. That means that the public arena should not be godless, but neither should it be dominated by religion. Before the 9th Circuit panel's ruling, we thought we had achieved an implicit, awkward but workable equilibrium. We did so by combining sharp limitations on religion's role in government institutions with at least some permission for its expression. Politicians are angry with the two judges not because they are "nuts," but because their unfortunate yet principled decision has forced us to decide explicitly if this is what we really want. © 2002 The Washington Post Company