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Jean Hay Bright on Education |
I pledge allegiance to the United States of America, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Now there's a pledge I can get behind. It says everything that needs to be said, and it removes both controversial phrases that have religious overtones. Both? Yes, both.
The first controversy has popped up every now and then in the century since the Pledge was first written. The problem for some people is in pledging allegiance to a symbol, an inanimate object.
The second, more current controversy, of course, is around the phrase "under God" that was forced upon the pledge by an act of Congress in 1954. I was seven years old in 1954, and I can remember our teacher explaining how we had to add those two words in the middle of the cadence that we had just memorized. Even then, as a seven-year-old, I thought the inclusion a little odd. At the age of seven, I was not yet well schooled in the finer points of the First Amendment.