One nation not under God? (News in Brief).

San Francisco -- At the beginning of July, a three-member panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that the Pledge of Allegiance taken by all schoolchildren was unconstitutional: it violated the First Amendment because it referred to "one nation under God." This decision set off a storm of controversy. Shortly after it was announced, the U.S. Senate voted 99-0 for a resolution expressing support for the Pledge of Allegiance and instructing the Senate's legal counsel to seek to intervene in the case to defend its constitutionality.

The Court of Appeals stayed the ruling almost immediately; the chief author of the decision on the pledge, Judge Alfred Goodwin, signed the stay. The U.S. Justice Department said it wanted the appellate court to reconsider the question before a broader panel, perhaps of eleven judges. Almost all commentators on the ruling had expected it to be overturned, perhaps by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Politicians in Washington were lining up to denounce the ruling as inconsistent with American patriotism. President Bush called Goodwin's initial ruling "ridiculous." One of the judges on the Circuit Court, Ferdinand Fernandez, had warned that under his colleagues' theory of the Constitution "we will soon find ourselves prohibited from using our album of patriotic songs in many public settings."

This was only the latest of a series of decisions on church-state issues. The previous week the same court ruled on the matter of a cross erected on public property owned by the city of San Diego. By a 7-4 vote, the court rejected the strategy used by the city to sell the property to a non-profit corporation dedicated to keeping the cross; the majority said that the sale was unconstitutional because it was rigged to exclude groups that might want to tear the cross down.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the 43-foot cross, which is a memorial to war victims, enjoys enormous public support. The American Civil Liberties Union, however, has waged a thirteen-year campaign against it on the ground that it violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

Fighting about God

Columnist Joseph Sobran throws a different kind of light on the controversy (Wanderer, July 11). Most Americans think that the pledge is a venerable document he said, like the Declaration of Independence, but it was composed by Francis Bellamy, a socialist, in 1892. His "one nation, indivisible" implied that the U.S. is a monolith, not a confederation; it instilled not the love of liberty, but submission to the government, inverting the idea that the people are superior to the government.

Liberals do not find that part offensive; they object only to "under God," words added only in 1954 to teach children that there is something higher than the government. The slogans of neutrality, pluralism, and liberalism are not in the Constitution; nor is the phrase "separation of church and state."

Notice how inured we have become to corrupt jurisprudence, adds Sobran. We take it for granted that liberal judges will use the Constitution to impose their own preferences. Time and again they rule that the Constitution "means" something no one has ever suspected it of doing.