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To: Dayuhan who wrote (15937)	6/29/2002 12:05:52 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

If that's the case, things have changed since I went to school. Probably not. The issue was decided by the USSC in 1943: aclu-wa.org atheism.about.com Since then, students who object do not have to recite or stand for the Pledge. Just a few years earlier, though, the Court ruled that a school district COULD require the Pledge,

To: Dayuhan who wrote (15937)	6/29/2002 9:03:45 PM
From: E	Respond to of 21057

It probably will be, for solely political reasons. Put political expedience up against the founding principles of the republic and expedience will win every time. That's about it. And since expediency will inevitably win in this case, witness people like Michael M getting all kinda vigilante-level hysterical over it, and since "indivisibility" is more important to me than to them, I personally agree with Laz that it was a strategic error to make a big deal of it. This relates tangentially to another subject I wish people would talk about. Michael M referring glancingly to it as "multiculturalism." It could be called "multiculturalism/immigration." And I'm going to post about that next ---->

To: Dayuhan who wrote (15937)	6/29/2002 9:07:46 PM
From: E	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 21057

Re: multiculturalism/immigration/western civiliation/political correctness/paranoia(?) I suspect that a large part of the reason so many Americans are upset over the Pledge-ruling relates to forebodings that demographic trends suggest that the cultural foundations of our society (aka of western civilization) are threatened. In a way, as I see it, America the Beautiful is based on a constructive conspiracy among its participants to believe in, maybe 'revere' isn't too strong a word, certain values that are enshrined in our founding documents. Many or most citizens don't even comprehend many of the specific principles enshrined there, and if they're taken out of context, reject them. But, except for fringe elements (I think of Michael M here, but that's my reaction to the kinds of things he says, and maybe he's calmed down... I've missed hundreds of posts), do comprehend that even if our own personal ox is gored by one provision or one SC interpretation or another, the baby is the Constitution, and the detail is the bathwater. The document is our secular Sacred Text, and love of the America of the Constitution is in way a religion we for the most part share. And have to share, for our "conspiracy" to work indefinitely. Questions have been raised (though not often in the mainstream media) about whether the process of assimilation on the part of new immigrants that has in the past made us one nation "indivisible" in a functional way will continue; or if the nature of our beloved constitutional democracy is in some way profoundly threatened. (When I say "beloved constitutional democracy" I'm being literal, about my emotions, at least, without making the silly claim we are perfect or near to it.) I'm pretty ignorant about all this, but that doesn't keep me from having picked up, peripherally, that a weakening of the American civil religion is probably not a paranoid concern, and from wanting to know what others are thinking about the subject. Michael M's reference to immigration plus the hysteria over the Pledge raised the subject in my mind. It's not a subject that imo can be discussed frankly within the constraints of political correctness. It's also a confusing one for an atheist who, having lived in the third world for several years, is a conscious (and consciously selfish) fan of western civilization yet is also a temperamental democrat with a small d. More ---->