Thursday, August 11, 2005

I survived the "Pledge" - you will too.

Seems another crackpot tried to sue a school district to stop them from starting the school day with a recitiation of the "Pledge of Allegiance." He lost.

When I attended school, we started with the Pledge. It included the words "under God." Yet, somehow, I turned out okay (i.e., I have yet to "thump" a Bible). Honestly, I never gave it any thought. I certainly never thought I was being somehow indoctrinated or preached to.

Here's an idea - if you don't like the Pledge's reference to God, you have the freedom to explain to your kids why they shouldn't take that line to heart. Better yet, maybe explain to them why it's there and examine the tension between the Establishment Clause and government's pervasive references to God.

In the marketplace of ideas, suppresion of ideas, any ideas, regardless of their perceived offensive nature, is another form of intellectual communism. Basically, only stupid people try to stifle expression with which they disagree, because to challenge or question or counter that expression with more thoughtful counter-expression is, well, just too much work. And as Homer Simpson says - "If something is too hard to do, then it's not worth doing."

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