The Pledge of a Grievance

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.

More top shelf stuff for my history buff self, but so what? How does the origin of something make something good or bad? If a socialist invented a drug that could cure dying babies do you really think libertarian parents would refuse to use it? It's what it is, not where it came from, that counts.

The current pledge bedlam erupted last summer when a Colorado judge restrained the state school system from mandating daily student body pledge-alongs. Fed judge Lewis Babcock based his ruling on the profound judicial principle that teachers would be the subject of discrimination, since students could opt out of the ordered orations with a note from Mommy while teachers couldn't, and that pro-pledge pupils would be pitted against anti-oath scholars, and that all students would be pitted against their teachers. In other words, people's feelings would get hurt.

And then the ACLU chipped in with this: "By forcing an individual to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, it violates the ideals of justice and liberty that the flag is meant to represent."

Now we're getting there. Extracting a government loyalty oath from public school children is legalized extortion. Public schools are institutions of coercion. Students are coerced to attend them. Parents are coerced to pay for them. A compulsory pledge has no more legal or moral authority than a confession tortured from a criminal suspect, no more validity than a military oath extracted from a conscript, no more legitimacy than a promise made to a burglar not to call the cops for two hours after your jewelry walks out your front door in his pockets.

Last year Lone Star Legiscrats mandated that students must pledge to the US flag and the Texas flag and, knowing Texas, probably to flag football as well. So now imagine the spectacle of powercrats planting palms on Bibles and pledging to defend and protect their state constitution, only to hedge on said pledge by demanding a patently unconstitutional law that compels children to learn patriotism by slapping hands on hearts and fomenting fealty for a flag.

Exactly what lifetime lessons did these youthful legislators-to-be take with them after years of dutifully delivering their Pledges of Allegiance in their own classrooms? Forcing someone to prattle a pledge dishonors the pledger and enforcer alike, as if politicalcrats and public schoolcrats and conservative jingoists need any more dishonoring. The only thing an obligatory oath will teach our tykes is hypocrisy. Why would anyone want that on the curriculum?

Libertarians don't compel patriotism. Living free in a free land is patriotic enough.

THE PLEDGE OF A GRIEVANCE

I pledge a grievance against politicians

Of the Imperial State of America.

I support The Republic, against which they stand,

Two Parties imitating gods, indistinguishable,

Against liberty, for injustice to all.