Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Is The Pledge Unconstitutional?

(Reprinted from the issue of April 1, 2004)

The U.S. Supreme Court is now hearing arguments that the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance is an unconstitutional attempt to establish religion.

Of course one trembles any time the Court is asked, or even given an opportunity, to decide a matter of principle. Soon, no doubt, it will be ruling on whether “marriage” means marriage. To paraphrase the noted semanticist Bill Clinton, I suppose it depends on what “means” means. Since the Court has long since redefined “human life,” it’s hard not to consider its other rulings anticlimactic.

“Under God” can be considered an establishment of religion only by stretching the idea of establishment absurdly. The Constitution merely forbids Congress — nobody seems to notice that “Congress” is the first word in the Bill of Rights! — to adopt or impose a national sectarian religion. Otherwise, the Founding Fathers spoke freely about God and recognized the importance of “religion,” by which they meant Christian worship in general.

The really objectionable words in the Pledge are “one nation, indivisible,” which actually are contrary to the Founders’ intentions. The Pledge was written by a northern socialist minister, whose name escapes me, late in the 19th century. The purpose of the Pledge was to indoctrinate children with the idea that the United States was a monolithic body — a consolidated nation-state — from which no individual state could withdraw. The war over secession was still a recent memory.

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the United States “are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States.” He would later add that they had never surrendered their sovereignty to the Federal Government, particularly to the Supreme Court; unless they could reassert their sovereignty by seceding, as a last resort, they would be at the mercy of federal tyranny.

This is one important, yet unlearned, lesson of Roe v. Wade. If the states had retained the right to secede, the Court wouldn’t have dared impose such an outrage on them, denying them the power to defend the unborn from physical violence.

The Civil War destroyed the sovereignty of all the states, North as well as South, and when this final defense of the states perished, it was only a matter of time until the defense of the unborn perished too.

Arbitrary judicial power was one result of that war, which is now remembered as a noble and picturesque memory rather than the horror it was. The U.S. Constitution now means whatever the U.S. Supreme Court, that unpredictable oracle, decides it means. It’s called a “living document,” when in truth it’s a dead letter.
 
The Clarke Revelations

Emerging facts about the Iraq war continue to embarrass the Bush administration. Richard Clarke, former head of President’s Bush’s national security staff and its counterterrorism expert, has published a memoir titled Against All Enemies, in which he relates his frustrating struggle to direct the War on Terrorism against al-Qaeda, while his higher-ups, including Bush himself, were determined to wage war on Iraq. Clarke insisted that Osama bin Laden, not Saddam Hussein, was behind the 9/11 attacks, and in July 2001 he warned that a major al-Qaeda attack was imminent; but he and other experts were brushed aside.

Clarke supported the War on Terrorism, but not the war on Iraq. By grim coincidence, the Madrid bombings have just indicated that he was right. The Iraq war did nothing to stop terrorists and may even have strengthened them. Clarke did think the war on Afghanistan might damage al-Qaeda, but Saddam Hussein’s regime had nothing to do with it.

According to Clarke, the neoconservatives, led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, were obsessed with hitting Iraq, Israel’s chief enemy, and resisted Clarke’s focus on al-Qaeda. He quotes Wolfowitz asking dismissively, “Who cares about a little terrorist in Afghanistan?”

Wolfowitz calls this a “fabrication,” but it rings true. The neocons, as well as the Bush team, were obsessed with Saddam. Al-Qaeda didn’t even qualify for the “axis of evil,” a conceit of the neocon speechwriter David Frum used in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union message. North Korea could somehow be linked to 9/11, but not al-Qaeda.

Bush himself pressed Clarke to find links between al-Qaeda and Saddam, but he was clearly more interested in the latter than the former. True to form, the Bush circle is now trying to portray Clarke as some sort of Clintonite dove, but he was eager to attack what he saw as the real problem, and he’d also served under Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush. He confirms, in richer detail, what Bush’s former treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, has also disclosed (only to be contradicted and defamed by the Bush circle).

The inside story of the Iraq war is a tale of bungling and deceit. No wonder that Uncle Sam is now seen, around the world, as Yosemite Sam, always firing wildly and missing the target. And no wonder Spain has now rejoined what the Bush team calls “Old Europe”: France, Germany, Belgium, and the Vatican, all of which are skeptical of America’s ability to handle the growing problem of terrorism without making it worse.
 
The Lesson That Wasn’t Taught

During the somewhat raucous and rancorous campaign against Mel Gibson’s movie, various writers, like Charles Krauthammer, accused Gibson of defying Vatican II by reviving “the lesson that had been taught for almost two millennia: that the Jews were Christ-killers.”

Funny, I was catechized before Vatican II, and I don’t remember that lesson. It’s not in the Gospels, the Creeds, the Church fathers (as I know them), or papal teachings; I don’t recall any mention of it in St. Thomas Aquinas or Dante. Odd that a doctrine allegedly so central in Christian history — and so hard to reconcile with the Christian principle of personal responsibility — should be so elusive. Yet Krauthammer says it resulted in “countless Christian massacres of Jews.”

So where is this notorious “lesson”? As a lover of English literature, I did a bit of spot-checking. Even if it was never an official teaching of the Church, it might have shown up in popular literature. I searched three famous Christian works whose villains were Jews. They accuse Jews of many things, but not of killing Christ.

First was “The Prioress’s Tale,” in The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer. It’s the story of an innocent child whose throat is cut by a band of Christian-hating Jews. The tale shows Jews in an ugly light, but there is no mention of their bearing guilt for the crucifixion.

Even more bizarre is The Jew of Malta, ascribed to Christopher Marlowe and dating from around 1590. Barabas, the Jew of the title, is a figure of almost farcical malice. He hates Christians so much that he walks abroad at night poisoning wells; when his own daughter converts and becomes a nun, he poisons her too, along with her whole convent. The play pulls out all the stops to make Barabas pure evil; yet there is no suggestion that he is a “Christ-killer.”

And of course there is Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. He hates Christians and tries to claim his “pound of flesh” from one of them. The Christians call him many names — “cutthroat,” “wolf,” “misbeliever,” “dog” — but it never occurs to them to call him a “Christ-killer.”

I might cite other works now considered anti-Semitic, such as Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, but why go on? To say that this slander against Jews was ever a major feature of Christian doctrine or popular culture is itself a slander.


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Joseph Sobran