Pledging Allegiance

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America,
and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God,
indivisible with liberty and justice for all."

The Pledge of Allegiance. We all know it. We recited it so often - every morning, in fact - in grade school that one can recite it, verbatim, without even thinking about the words. Rote memory.

Now that U.S. District Court judge Lawrence Karlton has upheld the ruling of the 9th District Court of Appeals that the use of "under God" violates our Constitutional rights, no doubt we'll hear a firestorm of protest from the Republican right and the religious fanatics. Never mind the fact that "under God" wasn't part of the original Pledge of Allegiance (above) written by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist, in 1892. In fact, "under God" was not added to the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954 when Congress amended the verbiage.

The interesting thing is that Bellamy, while a Christian, was ostracized from his church because of his socialist beliefs. His own granddaughter believes that Bellamy would have disliked the addition of "under God" because of the way he was treated by his own church.

There just seems to be so much irony in the fact that we have an oath of allegiance that was written by a socialist but is so strongly embraced by anti-socialist conservatives, and the word that seems to create so much fury, "God", was added after the fact by the U.S. Congress, in violation of the constitutional separation of church and state. Then we have the manner in which the pledge's author was treated by his own church. Love thy neighbor...unless he's a socialist, that is!