The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [82]
In late September 2001, barely three weeks after the fall of the World Trade Center, a day after the start of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, a Wisconsin school district banned a mandated recitation of the Pledge. Even in a media jam-packed with news of vital and historic impact, the Pledge decision would come to command national attention as television stations, newspapers, magazines, Matt Drudge, and Rush Limbaugh, rushed to heap scorn on the school board as unpatriotic. And several weeks later, on October 15, the board met to reconsider and was met by an audience of twelve hundred who shouted the Pledge, and followed it up with a chant of “USA! USA! USA!” By a vote of 6 to 1, the board overturned its earlier decision.
The shift from the use of the Pledge as a unifying force immediately after 9/11 to its familiar incarnation as a battering ram against woolly-headed “liberals” and the “cultural elite” was complete within six months. But it was half a year in which much had transpired. Indeed, the shift in the role of the Pledge corresponded to a transformation in the national mood as the country swung from mourning to a demand for justice, even vengeance.
This sentiment was never entirely lacking after the attacks on the World Trade Center. On September 20, President Bush famously told a joint session of Congress: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” His assertion in his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, that there existed an “axis of evil” was another landmark on the road to full-fledged war.
But if much of the country was taking its cues from the tone of the president, the event that completely polarized opinions around the Pledge was the decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in June 2002, agreeing with plaintiff Michael Newdow who complained that the Pledge was unconstitutional.
Only in America.
The proximity in time of the attack on the World Trade Center and the finding that the Pledge was unconstitutional, barely nine months apart, was uncanny. The two events, one inspiring instinctual and voluntary patriotism and the second challenging such patriotism, displayed an almost schizophrenic American temperament. Either that, or it was a sign that we were returning to the normalcy of the democratic (arguing) landscape. Still, the reaction to the court verdict was extraordinarily lopsided. The president called the decision “ridiculous.” The Senate voted unanimously to condemn the decision. The House Majority whip, Trent Lott (R.-Miss.), called it “absurd.” The Senate Majority leader, Tom Daschle (D.-S. Dak.), lambasted it as “just nuts.”
Although America has a long history of arguing over religious freedom, the Ninth Circuit court’s decision brought the Pledge squarely into the “for us or against us” arena at a time when the president himself had said it. And few politicians, whatever their political stripe, were willing to argue against the oath, especially at a time of intense patriotism. It was not long after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the Newdow case that the 2008 presidential contest began in earnest, and the rumor began to circulate that Senator Barack Obama (D.-Ill.) refused to say the Pledge. “Barack Obama, born in Africa, is a possibly gay Muslim racist who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance,” according to a Washington Post summary of the rumors.
These slurs stood in stark contrast to Obama’s Democratic opponent for the nomination, Senator Hillary Clinton, who had attacked the 2002 Ninth Circuit court decision in 2008, saying “I believe the court misinterpreted the intent of the framers of the Constitution and instead undermined one of the bedrocks of our democracy, that we are indeed, ‘one nation under God,’ ” and then, to much applause, reiterated her belief that “every American child should start the day saying the Pledge of Allegiance.”
Obama’s patriotism continued to be an issue even after he secured his party’s nomination,