U.S. to fight court ban on reciting of pledge

Not unpredictably,

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Thursday the Justice Department will fight to overturn a federal court ruling that the Pledge of Allegiance can't be recited in public schools because it contains a reference to God.

This was in response to a recent ruling by U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton in San Francisco that barred schools from using the pledge on the grounds that it contains "under God."

Interestingly Karlton said he was bound by the previous ruling of the ninth district, which he simply re-affirmed. When that ruling reached the Supreme Court, the court said that the plaintiff did not have standing to bring the case, not that the ruling was wrong.

It seems to me that a better issue than whether schools may use the pledge is whether Congress acted constitutionally when, as Bob Parks, put it, it

added the words "under God" [to the pledge] in 1954 at the suggestion of President Eisenhower. This was at the height of the communist witch hunt, at which time the public equated communism with atheism. A half-century later, we might note, the chief enemies of freedom are far from Godless.