Forcing Kids to Pledge Allegiance to the State

It’s kind of amazing that the idea of forcing kids to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance keeps coming up, but it does. Virginia state SEnator Warren Barry wants to make Virginia one of 22 states that require students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, even though such laws are clearly unconstitutional.

In the 1930s and 1940s an enormous controversy erupted in the United States when children who were Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to recite the Pledge. They maintained that reciting the Pledge violated a religious injunction not to worship false Gods. The anger toward the Jehovah’s Witnesses were so great there were numerous incidents of violence where believers were beaten by mobs.

In 1940 the Supreme Court originally ruled that Jehovah’s Witnesses could be forced to recite the Pledge, only to reverse itself in 1943 and rule that students could opt out of the Pledge requirement for religious or philosophical reasons. Still the desire to force children to Pledge their allegiance to the state is a powerful idea that won’t die.

Barry is an ex-Marine officer who was infuriated to se children in a Virginia school goofing off and ignoring the morning recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Barry told Scripps HOward that he was so angry he wanted to send the kids to a Marine boot camp to instill the proper patriotism (quite a strange way to reinforce the Pledge’s message of “liberty and justice for all.”) Instead he introduced his bill that in his words “mandate[s] respect for the flag.”

When the Virginia Senate modified his bill to allow for religious and philosophical exemptions, he quickly withdrew it calling those who had changed his bill “pinkos.” That’s an odd statement considering that the Pledge itself was written by socialist Francis Bellamy best known, aside for the Pledge of Allegiance, for his utopian socialist novels such as Looking Backward.

Only in the United States would a conservative Republican be stridently pushing for American children to recite a statist loyalty oath written by a 19th century socialist.

Source:

Virginia state senator presses pledge requirement. Jessica Wehrman, Scripps Howard News Service, February 18, 2001.

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