EDITORIAL SUPREME DELIVERANCE HIGH COURT SMACKS DOWN NINTH CIRCUIT ACTIVISM.

ON Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court tended to one of its more important, periodically re-occurring tasks:

Smacking down the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on the West Coast, thus bringing a little bit of sanity back to the law.

The Ninth - the most overturned appeals court in the nation - has a tendency to fire off on ideological tangents. And last year's ruling, that the words ``under God'' in the Pledge of Allegiance are unconstitutional, was a prime example.

In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court struck down that decision and restored the pledge to its original luster - for now.

Sidestepping the questions of church and state, the court seized on one of the Ninth Circuit's more brazen excesses: Allowing atheist Michael Newdow to file his suit against the pledge on behalf of his daughter.

The problem, the court observed, is that Newdow doesn't have custody over his daughter, and thus has no right to file such a claim. In fact, the girl's mother is a devout Christian who wants her daughter to say the full, uncensored pledge daily.

Forget the question of whether or not the pledge is constitutional; the Ninth overstepped its bounds merely by deciding the Newdow case in the first place. But that's typical for the Ninth, which is all too often more interested in pushing an ideology than in fairly and honestly interpreting the law.

And even though the Supreme Court skirted the question of what place God has in the pledge, there's reason to believe that, here, too, the justices think the Ninth got it wrong. Three justices signed a concurring opinion saying as much, one of them Sandra Day O'Connor, who is widely considered the bellwether or ``swing vote'' on contentious social issues.

No one knows for sure how the court would rule until some parent with custodial rights resumes Newdow's battle, which now seems all but inevitable. As the current flap over the cross on the Los Angeles County seal illustrates, those who take an absolutist position on the separation of church and state won't be satisfied until every hint of religion is struck from public life.

What they're undertaking is to push the establishment clause of the First Amendment - which prohibits government from imposing any one religion on everyone - to its illogical extreme.

Where does it stop? Some scholars argue that under existing precedents, legal challenges could successfully strip cities like Los Angeles or San Francisco of their religiously inspired names. It sounds far-fetched, but then, until about a month ago, so did going after the cross on the seal.

But benign, nonsectarian references to God in civic life, or the public display of historic symbols that carry a religious significance, don't amount to an official government religion. They're signs of a mature society that's unafraid of its spirituality, its roots or its diversity.

In striking down the Ninth Circuit ruling, even if only for technical reasons, the Supreme Court affirmed that ours is such a society after all.