The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [54]
The law of the nation or government that compels the child of God to salute the national flag compels that person to salute the Devil as the invisible god of the nation.
The Rutherford speech was a “call to arms” for Witnesses to begin an aggressive stand against participating in the Pledge ceremony. But given the oath’s widespread popularity and the already contentious reputation of the Witnesses, it’s not surprising that Rutherford’s words were greeted with ferocious antipathy by both the general public and the judges who were called upon to rule in cases that the Witnesses were able to get into court.
In the Carleton Nicholls case against the school district of Lynn, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the school board and confirmed the right of the school to expel students who refused to participate in the Pledge salute. Moreover, the court, in its written decision, adamantly found no violation of religious freedom in a mandatory obligation for reciting the Pledge:
The flag salute and Pledge of allegiance here in question do not in any just sense relate to religion. . . . They do not concern the view of any one as to his Creator. They do not touch upon his relations with his Maker. They impose no obligations as to religious worship. . . . There is nothing in the salute or the Pledge of allegiance which constitutes an act of idolatry, or which approaches to any religious observance. It does not in any reasonable sense hurt, molest, or restrain a human being in respect to “worshipping God” within the meaning of the words in the Constitution.
Of the dozen major cases that the Witnesses were involved in against school districts, most of the court decisions echoed the Nicholls opinion by the Massachusetts high court: there was nothing at all religious about the Pledge or the requirement that it be recited; it was, instead, a rightful patriotic act. In this case and in most of the Witnesses’ other court battles the group was supported by the ACLU, which had its roots as an advocacy group defending conscientious objectors to military service during World War I. Formed in 1920 with a stated mission “to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States,” the ACLU has pursued this goal through the court system with a diligence that has frustrated many a “patriot.”
The early cases that the Witnesses and the ACLU pursued yielded very little court agreement with their perspective. In fact, a few courts added the opinion that people who were willing to partake in free public education should be required to follow the rules of the public school system. For example, a decision of the New Jersey Supreme Court in a Jehovah’s Witnesses case put it bluntly: “Those who do not desire to conform with the demands of the statute can seek their schooling elsewhere.”
This is indeed what happened. As more and more Jehovah’s Witnesses children were expelled from the public school system, the Witnesses started setting up “Kingdom Schools” in several states that had been chosen by Rutherford’s legal team as possible places that would get them the prize they were looking for. Namely, the chance to take their argument to the U.S. Supreme Court. They could then focus on Witness children in the public school without worrying that they would miss an education while their elders fought over them in court.
Finally, while the number of Kingdom Schools grew to accommodate the larger numbers of Witness children expelled from public schools across the nation, the Witnesses and their partner the ACLU found the case they were looking for in Minersville, Pennsylvania, a small town located halfway between Harrisburg and Allentown in the heart of Pennsylvania’s hardscrabble coal mining country.
The case started