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Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (17052)	7/9/2002 12:37:59 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

Excerpst from a piece from today's Washington Post, which you beat me to by posting in its entirety on BB, I see. Pious Pledgers All By Richard Cohen ...after a federal court ruled that the phrase "under God" amounted to a coercive attempt to establish religion, the entire Congress rose as one and, insisting otherwise, recited the pledge. Not a single member had the guts to dissent... ...The words, as we all know, were added in 1954 to emphasize the difference between the United States and the Soviet Union. We believed in God and the communists did not. It was a simplistic formulation. Osama bin Laden believes in God. So do the Serbs who fought a vicious war in the Balkans with the enthusiastic support of the Orthodox Church. And so do the Hindus who retaliated against Muslim extremists in India by burning innocent Muslims in their homes. All over the world, some people are willing to kill other people in the name of God. Nonetheless, the words were inserted in the pledge. We didn't need it to fight the Nazis, but for some reason we did to fight the commies. I was 12 or 13 when the phrase became law and I recognized it for what it was: a governmental effort to establish religion. That religion, I knew, was not my own. It was the majority's religion -- the president's and Congress's and, of course, that of the teacher at the head of the classroom. She and they wanted me to say those words... ...After a lifetime in journalism, I can tell you that some members of Congress are religious skeptics. Some are even agnostics or atheists. That's true of society in general and it is no less true of our national leaders. ...If these men and women, adults with immense influence, were cowed into acting like 8-year-olds in the classroom, then how can we expect real 8-year-olds to assert their constitutional right to delete the phrase or not recite the pledge at all? What kid can stand up to that kind of pressure? Certainly, no member of Congress could...