The Pledge of Allegiance

This will be short and interspersed with yet more great pictures and comments from my trip around the world. I seem to have a lot of things to say lately that that are likely to alienate my friends and enemies alike. Just wait until you read the upcoming post about stones!

A lot of people follow me and I follow them on Facebook. That place is the repository for more inane memes and commentary than anyplace I’ve ever imagined. I’m pretty sure that if there is a hell it is a daily feed of memes from Facebook. So, it is just as stupid for me to respond to them. Still, here I am.

The "Man on a Horse" statue took on new dimensions in Brno, Czech Republic. Apparently they cut the budget for the pedestal and just lengthened the legs!

One of the most common posts I see has to do with keeping the words “under God” in the pledge of allegiance and how that made us all somehow mystically better citizens when we were growing up. When my first grade teacher taught us the pledge, she was still stumbling over those words that had just been added to the pledge the previous year. They weren’t there in the pledge my parents knew. Still, my parents’ generation had no difficulty standing up to the Nazis, the Japanese, and the Koreans. Somehow the nation had survived the first and second World Wars and the Great Depression without reciting those words.

This is Na Stojika in Brno. It means "to stand." There are always different beers to try at the bar, but then you bring your mug or glass outside and sit around or stand around the plaza. It's pretty calm here on a Sunday afternoon, but Saturday night there were a couple hundred people just standing around with their beers talking!

Dwight Eisenhower pushed to have the words added after a Presbyterian minister preached a sermon about it. Eisenhower was a new convert to the Presbyterian Church. Somehow he’d managed a successful military endeavor in WWII and a campaign for presidency without them. In spite of the fact that the U.S. Senate formally censured Senator Joseph McCarthy at the end of 1954, they were still so cowed by the threat of being called communists and homosexuals that no one dared stand against the addition of this obviously anti-communist sentiment to our nation’s pledge. In 1956, “In God We Trust” was added to our nation’s currency, again with Eisenhower's and his minister's encouragement. McCarthy, at least, had the good grace to die the next year and finally end the witch hunts he inspired. Sadly, we don't seem to have learned anything from that.

This is the moat at Castle Spilberk. The doors at the left led into the dungeons. When I look at it, I can easily forget that the prison could hold three or four hundred people and I think "Wouldn't Dick Williams have loved this for a theater set. I can almost see Shakespeare being performed here, but I think he'd probably find a way to stage "Hello Dolly" here if he had to.

Whatever your religious sympathies (and let us not forget that it was Jehovah’s Witnesses that refused to stand and recite the pledge in classrooms, not Muslims) please recognize the fact that these two phrases are not part of our national heritage. They did not make us better citizens. They were not in the plans of our founding fathers who expressly indicated both in the Constitution and in their private correspondence that this was not a “Christian Nation”, and that no one had the right to force other citizens to adhere to any portion of their religious beliefs as part of national law. The words “under God” and “In God We Trust” are both primary examples of the government mandating adherence to a religious belief in order to be considered loyal Americans.

I find that mandate to be utterly repugnant.

These four guys bear the weight of a huge building on their shoulders. They never get a break. Whenever you think life has you weighed down, think about these guys. It isn't so bad.

The constitution supposedly guarantees that the government will not pass any legislation that supports or promotes a specific religion. It does not say, “except Christianity.”

Get over it.