September 20, 2005
Under
Some parents whom one must presume are well-meaning are trying once again to impress a judge to get the nation out from under God in the Pledge of Allegiance. They seem to be as alarmed as they might be if the Pledge were somehow X-rated.
Whatever, I say it’s high time, and beside that, the phrase is unnecessarily and historically redundant. Anybody who’d bother to look would see that our founders had already been there and done that when they repeatedly made clear in the Declaration of Independence what they were up to and who they were under. It’s surely no secret that they kept referring their actions to our “Creator” and to “Nature’s God” and to their reliance on “Divine Providence.”
Besides, the phrase never was in the Pledge in the first place until back in the 1950s when old Joe McCarthy intimidated us into thinking we were probably communists and unpatriotic if we didn’t put it there. Maybe we really ought to take it out. God’s surely got her hands full already.
Of course, those well-meaning parents might just take after Luis Bunuel, the Spanish film director, who, when asked about his religious views, said, “I am an atheist,” and then added, “Thank God.”
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