Subject: The Pledge and Paper
Date: Fri, Jul 5 2002 11:08:52 -0400

Ok, after a July 4th break, I'm back with a little community service. Most of you know that I love to hate Urban Legends, Internet Hoaxes and Chain Emails. Well, the latest thing to be going around the net are online petitions regarding the recent 9th Circuit decision regarding the pledge. Unfortunately, there's also a lot of misinformation ciruclating with these petitions, not the least of which is the effectiveness of internet petitions.

Affixing your name to an email and forwarding it to everyone you know is worse that useless: it wastes our already diminishing Internet bandwidth, it annoys people needlessly, and--and this is the most important part--it rarely gets to the people it's meant to reach. Most internet petitions never reach their intended targets, and those that do... are discarded. I don't know of a single lawmaker who gives any creedence to an internet petition.

If you really want to make a difference, send an individual email to YOUR congressperson or senator--they'll listen to an email from an individual constituent more readily than an email with lots of names attached to it that could have been more easily randomly generated that actually circulated. Or, better yet, dust off your pen and paper and invest in a 37 cent stamp. The Post Office is there for a reason.

As usual, I don't ask you to take my word for it. I've included a link to my favorite Urban Legend debunking site, http://urbanlegends.about.com/. The following can be found at http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blpledge.htm.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ignited a furor when it ruled on June 26, 2002 that the phrase "one nation under God" renders the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional because it violates the "establishment of religion" clause of the First Amendment (see news sources below). The case was brought by an atheist in California who alleges that the daily recitation of the flag salute in his daughter's classroom is an infringement of her rights, even if she is not required to participate.

To say the decision has sparked criticism is an understatement. It was immediately attacked by media pundits, by lawmakers at every level of government and by ordinary American citizens in every part of the country. Legal experts expressed the mostly unanimous opinion that the ruling would not stand in a higher court. Implicitly acknowledging its controversiality, the same federal judge who authored the decision issued a stay the following day blocking its enforcement indefinitely. The Justice Department vowed to expedite a rehearing of the case.

Historically, the Pledge of Allegiance has not always contained a reference to the Almighty. The oath was written in 1892 by the utopian socialist Francis Bellamy, whose version concluded, simply, "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." The phrase "under God" was inserted in 1951 by a chapter of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic service organization, which went on to successfully lobby Congress to adopt its version as the official one in 1954. Thus it has stood for nearly 50 years.

The recent constitutional challenge has resulted in a plethora of online petition drives such as the above, in some cases promising to deliver "millions" of names to the President and Congress in protest against the 9th Circuit Court ruling. Concerned citizens on either side of the controversy should stop to consider, however, that even in this digital age the good, old-fashioned measure of putting pen to paper and bombarding elected officials with cards and letters is still generally regarded as the most effective way to let one's voice be heard.