Yep. I went there.<\/p>\n
I love the Pledge. I love my country. Two days after high school graduation I was standing at attention with my head shaved and my sphincter clenched as a DI roared at me. That\u2019s how much I love my country.<\/p>\n
But \u201cUnder God\u201d should not be there. It just shouldn\u2019t, and if you really do support what America stands for, you\u2019ll see that.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll outline the reasons:<\/p>\n
1. It\u2019s not in the original.<\/strong><\/p>\n The Pledge was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minster, and even he didn\u2019t see the need to put in \u201cunder God.\u201d The original text is \u201cI pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cUnder God” was added in 1954, during the Cold War, at a time that gave us other great ideas like “Duck and Cover,” McCarthyism and sending \u201cadvisors\u201d to Vietnam.<\/p>\n So don\u2019t get all irate that we\u2019re bucking tradition by taking it out. The men who stormed Omaha Beach and raised the flag on Iwo Jima did not say \u201cunder God\u201d when they recited the pledge. They seem to have done OK without it.<\/p>\n 2. It pretty much violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019ll let you guys go check. Just find the Second Amendment (you all know that one) and look right above it. And there\u2019s eight more under it in the Bill of Rights. Wild, I know.<\/p>\n Anyway, right there in the Constitution you can find the clause: \u201cCongress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…\u201d<\/p>\n Which means, basically, that the US will not have an \u201cofficial\u201d state religion, or prevent me, if I\u2019m a Buddhist for example, from practicing my own religion by, oh, I dunno, making me swear fealty to your God.<\/p>\n So, yeah, I think it\u2019s fairly clear, you don\u2019t get to insert your God of choice into the Pledge for everybody.\u00a0 Liberty and justice for all<\/strong><\/em>, bitches.<\/p>\n Know your Constitution if you\u2019re gonna yell about it.<\/p>\n 3. The “Under God” part kinda invalidates the \u201cFor all\u201d part.<\/strong><\/p>\n We should strive for Liberty and Justice for all. Not single out and persecute groups because they follow a different religion.\u00a0 Kinda why some of our ancestors left the Old Country in the first place. Especially those guys in funny hats who founded Massachusetts and then did something with tea and a harbor…It\u2019ll come to you if you think.<\/p>\n Know your history.<\/p>\n 4. Other oaths of service seem to do OK without it<\/strong>.<\/p>\n When a young man, fresh out of high school in 1986, stood at the Military Entrance Processing Center and repeated the oath to defend this nation from all foes both foreign and domestic, the Marine administering it finished by saying: \u201cYou may add the phrase \u2018so help me, God\u2019 if you so choose.\u201d<\/p>\n So, if the freaking Marine Corps thinks you can mean what you say and serve your country without the help of the great Sky God, I think that should be good enough for Mrs Mulcahy\u2019s first grade class.<\/p>\n Although, if I had to go back in time, and\u00a0 pick Parris Island or St Joseph\u2019s Elementary to repeat, I\u2019d probably think real hard for a minute and then line up to get my head shaved again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yep. I went there. I love the Pledge. I love my country. Two days after high school graduation I was standing at attention with my head shaved and my sphincter clenched as a DI roared at me. That\u2019s how much I love my country. But \u201cUnder God\u201d should not be there. It just shouldn\u2019t, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89,"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions\/89"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}