Anti-Climacus

9th CIRCUIT COURT RULING:

Well, like most people, I think those judges who found the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional are morons. But I can assure you that's only for legal reasons. I'll make two quick notes about the ruling:

1. The Court noted there were two requirements that had to be met by the Plantiff to establish his case: that the injury inflicted by reciting the Pledge was both immediate and concrete (that is, having a definite ill effect, rather than a merely theoretical one). The Court determined that the child having to listen to the Pledge was a harm both immediate and concrete. But, it seems to me, they Quined away the most important part: an act can be immediate and concrete in its effects, and still not be at all injurious. The Court began with the assumption that a recitation of the Pledge was in some sense a hostile act: therefore, no one can be quite surprised at the conclusion they came to.

However, this leaves unanswered the question as to what exactly the harm may have been. It certainly wasn't the law passed by California, or the school district's code requiring recitation of the Pledge: Barnette v. West Virginia School Board established, if nothing else, that a school district may reasonably direct the civic education of children as they see fit, provided no one is ever forced to take part. This was not the case here. It would be dubious to claim, as the Plantiff did, that the mere mention of God was the cause of harm. If this were the case, the Court would then logically seem to embrace the idea that it is never okay to discuss or mention God in any setting whatsoever, which would be well and good if this case involved and overly coercive Administration at the school, but it does not. Clearly, though, banning casual mention of God (which is the direction the ruling seems to be pushing in, even if it never explicitly reaches that point) actually ends up restricting the free-speech rights of many more people, and in a much more immediate and concrete way that any discomfort.

2. The really curious part of the ruling is that in declares the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional. It would make significantly more sense (and be better backed by legal precedent) to declare either the California statute or school board policy illegal, since you could claim either as being overly coercive... or at least, that would be a reasonable argument one could make. But, to refer again to Barnette, the Supreme Court saw nothing wrong with the Pledge per se, just the compulsory nature of some policies on recitation. None of the precedents I read in the ruling persuasively made the case otherwise.

Well, that's what I think, but what do I know?