[thechat] What?? WHAT?????

[Jonathon Isaac Swiderski]

The cows moooved Norman Bunn to say:

> To say that the forefathers of the US didn't believe that the nation was
> "under God", is a joke!

.. . . and if anyone here or in the ruling has said that, i missed it, and you have
my heartfelt permission to laugh outrageously, if you take permissions from 19-year-
olds. . . reread the First Amendment again.  It's not that they didn't believe the
nation was under a god; it's that no-one else has to, or can be made to, or can even
be pressured to pretend to.

See also [http://frwebgate4.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/waisgate.cgi?
WAISdocID=15755530838+0+0+0&WAISaction=retrieve] -- "That government generally may
not compel a person to affirm a belief is the principle of the second Flag Salute
Case" (West Virginia State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943) (in a
previous case, 310 U.S. 586 (1940), Jehovah's Witnesses were expelled from schools
for refusing to salute a flag; this decision overruled the 1940 case.)).  "The state
policy, [Justice Jackson, writing for the Court] said, constituted 'a compulsion of
students to declare a belief. . . . It requires the individual to communicate by
word and sign his acceptance of the political ideas [the flag] bespeaks.'" To cast
this in the context of the Pledge of Allegiance, to require a student to speak, "One
Nation, under God" in the Pledge forces them to say that they accept and believe in
those words.  "The power of a State to follow a policy that 'requires affirmation of
a belief and an attitude of mind' is limited by the First Amendment" -- it is a
violation of the student's freedom of speech, not just of the Freedom of Religious
Expression.

Then there are the crackpots who try to say that students give away their
Constitutional rights when they enter a schoolhouse.  I've never understood that
position, so I can't really explain it. . .



Jonathon Isaac Swiderski
cs.oberlin.edu/~jswiders

proving why i was rated 'most liberal' in the poll a couple weeks ago. . .

--
Jonathon Isaac Swiderski       jswiders at cs.oberlin.edu
cs.oberlin.edu/~jswiders \\ members.evolt.org/jswiders

"University of Wisconsin statistics department...
          where mean is normal, and deviation standard."