What’s wrong with the pledge?
Filed under: Holidays, Education, Religion & spirituality
The pledge of allegiance, with its references to "Richard Stans" and our "invisible" nation, is mis-quoted every morning by public school children across the nation. There are those, however, who are unhappy about this, most famously because of the two-word phrase added in the 1950's in order to ward off the communist threat.The pledge was written in 1892 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the new world by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and Christian Socialist. The original version was "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." In the 1920's, "my Flag" was changed, against Bellamy's wishes, to "the Flag of the United States of America."
The phrase "under God" was added in 1954 due to pressure from the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal service organization. According to Bellamy's granddaughter, the original author would not have approved of this change either. There is a lot of opposition to the recitation of the pledge, as it stands, by schoolchildren, most notably by Michael Newdow, an attorney and physician who, in 2000, filed a lawsuit in order to make sure his daughter could "go to public school free from daily theistic indoctrination."
A lot of people, however, don't get what all the hoopla is about -- why not just let it be, especially since the Supreme Court has ruled that students are not required to recite it? There are a number of reasons, actually, so in the interest of fostering understanding on this, the anniversary of our nation's birth, here are some of them:
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