November/December 2002

Since 9/11 2001 we have each been caught up in the sense of crisis, a world in jeopardy, and the forces of history turning once again. Here in North America we live in the knowledge that our towers of invulnerability have fallen...they were always vulnerable, but the two way mirrors we put on the exterior were often around the wrong way for us to see out, and we smiled at our reflection of security.

Former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau once likened living next door to the United States to sleeping with an elephant—no matter how friendly the elephant is, you can’t help feeling its every twitch and grunt. Canadians are familiar with this “sleeping with the elephant” syndrome—everything that happens in the U.S. inevitably impacts Canada.

Many people would agree, on First Amendment principles, that the funneling of tax money, either directly or indirectly, to religious education is a bad idea. Now, it’s one thing when people use a good argument to defend a bad idea. Or even when people use a bad argument to defend a good idea. In the case of vouchers, however, some now are using a bad argument to defend a bad idea.

If a student swears in acting class, does God hear? Apparently not, according to University of Utah acting professors. Or, if He does, it doesn’t count because, hey, it is acting, after all. It’s not like she means it. Right? Well . . .

A week before the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Cleveland voucher case, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), I was coleading a seminar on religious liberty. My friend and fellow instructor told the group that if the Court upheld tuition vouchers for private religious schools, the establishment clause of the First Amendment would be effectively dead.

The Right Call
The 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week cable channels treated it like the death of a celebrity, a major natural disaster, or the verdict in the O. J. Simpson case. Even though it was only a 2-1 decision by a federal appeals court holding that a 1954 act of Congress that added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional.

Is God an American Institution
We recited the words to the Pledge of Allegiance in grade school, hands over our hearts, eyes trained on the red, white, and blue. We were told to stand at attention, remembering all those who fought and died for our freedoms. As we grew older, we recited the words by rote.

Unpublished until 1946, cited in Irving Brant, The bill of rights
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965)

The timing was at the very least a guaranteed attention-getter: one week before this year’s Fourth of July celebrations, the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals ruled that recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America in public school classrooms constitutes an unacceptable state endorsement of religion. Reactions were immediate and loud, and they were almost universally negative. Emotion trumped reason. Attempts to understand the ruling fell away before effusive denunciations of the court even by leaders at the highest levels of the nation. Senate majority leader Tom Daschle (D–S. Dak.) called the decision “just nuts.” President George W. Bush labeled the ruling “ridiculous.”