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Introduction Individuality is fine, as long as we all do it together. —Major Frank Burns from the TV series M*A*S*H In my sophomore year of high school, my homeroom teacher was a man named Ernie Steinman. Tall and bespectacled, he was not one for a lot of rules. Homeroom in late 1970s northern New Jersey was an unruly ritual. Most mornings, we (or at least my closest friends at the time and I) straggled in and, after staring out the window and waking up a bit (we had not been raised on the ritual of morning coffee that so many kids observe today), talked and would eventually make enough noise to drown out the few announcements about school events that Ernie would try to make. Our lack of structure, not to mention our lack of decorum, would probably make the standardized testing industry and the teachers and parents they have frightened for the last quarter century or so wince out of frustration. There was one ritual in particular that Ernie did not make us observe : saying the Pledge of Allegiance, as children in most schools across the country did each morning. At the beginning of the school year, he announced —mentioned in passing is a more accurate characterization— that we would not say the Pledge. Before you more conservative folks begin mounting an effort to track Ernie down so that he can defend himself on The O’Reilly Factor, I should say that it is unclear to me now, 25 years later, if his choice was one of conviction or of convenience. Like us, Ernie saw homeroom as a 10-minute obstacle, something to be endured. Either way, though, Ernie’s action planted a tiny seed of rebellion (if not critical thinking ability) in my adolescent head. 1 Since I was not an avid fan of hard rock music (at the time, anyway), and didn’t smoke or drink, not saying the Pledge was as rebellious as I got, and I loved it. It wasn’t an antinuclear power protest march (which my parents probably wouldn’t have let me go to) or burning my draft card (which I was too young to have), but it was a stand. I was cool—in my own mind, anyway. Our friends couldn’t believe that we got away with not saying the Pledge. Ernie could have sold tickets to our homeroom. I thought of Ernie as a lawsuit filed in 2000 by “avowed atheist” Michael Newdow made its way through the courts. Newdow claimed that the inclusion of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance amounted to an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. Newdow believes that requiring his daughter to sit in her classroom at Florence Markofer Elementary School and listen while her classmates recited the Pledge amounted to coercion. She was free not to recite the Pledge, but Newdow contends (and many educational psychologists might agree) that a classroom full of fourth graders is not a spot conducive to practicing nonconformity. In June 2002, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals surprised the country, and shocked conservatives, when it found first that the Pledge itself was unconstitutional, and then, in an amended opinion, that the mention of God in the Pledge was an unconstitutional breach of the wall that separates church and state. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, responding in 1954 to members of Congress and to pressure from the Knights of Columbus (the nation’s largest Catholic organization) and a slew of editorials and stories published by the Hearst newspaper chain, approved the addition of “under God” to the Pledge as a politically expedient reaction to the alleged insinuation of “atheistic Communism” into our lives. Elisabeth Sifton (2004) points out that President Eisenhower “saw no harm in affirming that America, battling against godless Communism was doing so ‘under God’” (p. 13). The Ninth Circuit’s original decision brought a firestorm of criticism from citizens, scholars, and public officials, coming as it did in the still long shadow of the September 11, 2001, attacks. In an almost surreal coincidence, on Flag Day 2004 the Supreme Court overturned the Ninth Circuit’s ruling. The high court did not address whether the words “under God” were unconstitutional. Instead, the justices held that because Newdow did not have legal custody of his daughter at the time she was hearing the Pledge (Newdow and the little girl’s mother never married, and later ended their relationship), he lacked standing to sue...

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