Constitutional Complaints

Having never been particularly Christian (despite my mother’s assertion, when asked directly to which religion we belonged, that we were “Methodist”) or even particularly deist or theist--descriptions of “God” were, in my mind, anyway, virtually indistinguishable from descriptions of “Santa Claus,” right down to the beard--plus being aware of that whole First Amendment thing about our government staying the hell away from religion, I’ve found it fascinating that at least two of the Republican candidates claim to have been “called” by God to run for president.

Which, while leisurely free-associating this lazy and generally purposeless Saturday (it WAS my day off), led me to some more reinventing-of-the-wheel kinds of things, for instance why “under God” was belatedly inserted into the “Pledge of Allegiance,” and why “In God We Trust” was adopted as the nation’s “motto” three years before I was born, and about 167 years after the Constitution of the United States was ratified. “Epluribus Unum” seemed a much better fit, after all.  "Out of many, one."  Parse "united" and "state"--the latin describes what we, as a nation, have aspired to be infinitely more accurately than the "under God" thing.

But smarter people than I have raised these questions before, and smarter folks than all of us, wearing Supreme Court robes, have essentially dismissed them (gotta love what Justice Brennan said, in a 1984 decision about something or other: “ ...I would suggest that such practices as the designation of 'In God We Trust' as our national motto, or the references to God contained in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag can best be understood, in Dean Rostow’s apt phrase, as a form a 'ceremonial deism,' protected from Establishment Clause scrutiny chiefly because they have lost through rote repetition any significant religious content.” Basically, through sheer repetition, the phrases have become meaningless.

Certainly that was true for me in sixth grade, when Mrs. Henderson directed us every day in repetition not only of the Pledge of Allegiance, but also in something called “The American’s Creed,” which, by the way, was adopted by Congress as the “National Creed of the United States” back in 1918.  (Who'd a' thought we ever had a "national creed"?)

Mrs. Henderson also encouraged us to “rat out” our classmates for various indiscretions. For instance, somebody ratted me and my friend, Steve Swords, out for only mouthing the words to the Pledge and the Creed, not actually saying them aloud. Mind you, we were NOT protesting having to recite them; we just both happened to be painfully shy, and speaking aloud didn’t come easily to us. So Mrs. Henderson made us stand up together, in front of the class, and recite the stuff aloud. Only in retrospect do I see how counter that punishment runs to the spirit of both the Pledge and the Creed.

Of course, Mrs. Henderson was also the one who made us memorize and recite for the Christmas play that year a section of the Bible (Luke 2:1-20, to be precise), and so indeed it came to pass that we stood together on stage, somberly reciting that great news or whatever to our assembled family and friends, who in some cases were as mystified by it as many of us were. Good thing for Mrs. (and, by the way, that was in the early 1970's--"Mrs." hadn't yet fallen into disfavor) Henderson that the ACLU never heard about it.

My life was not particularly disrupted by having to recite the Pledge and Creed and Bible passages aloud; nor was I particularly traumatized by it. And, in fairness, Mrs. Henderson was an enthusiastic teacher who helped us learn to love learning about other cultures, and a grammar fanatic, so almost everything I know about writing (which may not be much) can be traced back to her, and the way she shaped us.

I’m only guessing, but imagine that Mrs. Henderson was probably born sometime in the 1920s, a few years before my dad, basically was coming of age in the 1950s (after the uncomfortable interruptions of the Great Depression and World War II)--along about the time Joe McCarthy was doing HIS thing about “godless communists,” etc.

McCarthy “shaped” Mrs. Henderson, I think. Had he never existed, my sixth-grade class likely would still have learned a lot about English grammar and South and Central American food and Panamian golden frogs, but probably we would not have been forced to mindlessly recite a whole bunch of words that essentially meant nothing to us, every day of our sixth-grade lives.

“In God We Trust” was adopted as our national motto in 1956, just two years after “under God” was inserted into the “Pledge of Allegiance" (to the FLAG OF the United States of America, not the republic itself, which is interesting, but probably the subject of a whole 'nother rant).

If you listen to Republicans, our republic has been on a downhill slide ever since about the “Happy Days” era--the 1950s.

Coincidence?