PrintMarch 14, 2010
Backing Away from the Wall
It is an article of faith on the left that a "Wall" separating church and state justifies hounding religion out of the public square. But the federal courts have been backing away from that metaphor.March 11, 2010 may go down as another politically historic day. On that date, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco voted in a 2-1 decision that the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is constitutional. This surprising verdict from the most overturned federal appeals courts in the nation must have come as a shock to Michael Newdow, who had previously won and then lost this argument before on the technical grounds of standing. Newdow considered it American political bedrock that, as Thomas Jefferson had written to Danbury Baptists in 1802, the Constitution erected "a wall separating church and state." Such an edifice meant that he could remove the pledge from the public school classrooms for much of America.In 1878, the U.S....(Read Full Article)
