Anti-Climacus

QUOTE: On the pledge-ruling psycho.

"This cultural tendency may make judges and certainly makes journalists, the great mythographers of our times, naturally sympathetic to people like the plaintiff in the Pledge of Allegiance suit, Michael Newdow of Sacramento. 'I feel like I am not an American in the eyes of my government because of their religious beliefs,' Newdow told Stefanie Frith of the Associated Press, supposedly while 'sitting in shorts and a t-shirt at his kitchen table.' Naturally, he thinks that 'un-American.' And why, pray, does he think that? Because 'Congress never intended to force people to worship a religion that they don't believe in,' he says, which sounds rather odd coming from a man who would use the courts to prevent Congress from having any say in the matter of what it did or didn't intend...

For if his campaign to stamp out 'all insidious uses of religion in daily life' is based on his own hurt feelings ('Why should I be made to feel like an outsider?' he asks, avoiding the obvious answer that he is one), why should not he, or some half-wit judge acting as his surrogate, decide that the pronouns of the English language hurt his feelings as well and command us all to change the way we speak?"