When Michael Newdow filed his lawsuit against a San Francisco school district two years ago, the world was a very different place. Murderous thugs wearing imaginary cloaks of Islamic righteousness had not yet flown passenger jets into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside.
Before that assault on American soil and sovereignty, Newdow's complaint was just the kind of minor pique that a lazy, litigious society had the leisure to entertain. There are, however, no atheists in foxholes, as the saying goes, and with America now at war, an angry and sorrowing public has little patience to spare for Newdow's aggressive atheism. But public sentiment could change again.
Newdow launched his crusade to protect his second-grade daughter from the psychological damage that might be wrought by the Pledge of Allegiance. Last Wednesday a federal appeals court ruled in Newdow's favor, finding that the phrase "one nation under God" renders the pledge unconstitutional.
Their decision will almost certainly be overturned. It's certainly loathed. In the past week, Newdow's fellow Americans have criticized, decried and mocked both him and the federal court. Many have called the case "stupid" or "silly" or "trivial."
But the court's decision should not be overturned because it's stupid and silly. Nor should it be overturned because it's trivial. It should be overturned because it is internally contradictory. It fails Logic 101.
The public judgment that Newdow's cause is trivial is an emotional one; in light of what the country has just been through, with millions turning to whatever God we think we're "under," we just can't imagine anyone getting his knickers in a constitutional twist over two little words.
But the words of the Pledge aren't little, and they aren't trivial. Although they weren't added until 1954, they acknowledge both the nation's history and its political philosophy -- its founding and its foundation.
Some of our forebears, such as John Adams and George Washington, were Christians. Others such as Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin were theists. All explicitly believed in an absolute moral authority on whom -- or on which -- to base their understanding of human dignity and inalienable rights.
They held these to be "self-evident." They knew that the society they sought to create was impossible without this shared understanding. They appealed to this moral authority as a being, instead of a mere force or higher power.
They referred to a "Creator" and to "Nature's God," words which possess greater symbolic weight, but the founders' private beliefs about just who or what that authority is varied widely.
Whenever we respond to a perceived injustice with the words "That's not fair," we are appealing to this higher moral authority and to the fact that belief in its existence is universally shared. We all do this, every day, even atheists. When we do, we demonstrate that we believe in a God in the broadest sense of the word -- the sense that the nation's founders held in common.
This is our civic religion. Without it, our society has no philosophical underpinnings. And if there is no absolute moral authority, then, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it, whoever has the biggest guns, wins.
We see the consequences of "might makes right" in the Third Reich, behind the Iron Curtain, and along The Shining Path. We reject those consequences, so we need to affirm their antidote.
The ruling from the federal appeals court appeals to a higher moral authority to assert that we must not, as a society, acknowledge a higher moral authority. That is its internal contradiction. The ruling fails Logic 101 and always will, so long as there is a republic to which we can pledge our allegiance.
Newdow's family and other dissenters may choose not to acknowledge the foundation and framework that make lawsuits like this possible, but their dissent must remain dissent. The pledge is both historically and philosophically accurate. It is true, and it is necessary.
We the people -- or most of us -- have not understood that so clearly and passionately for a long time. The federal appeals court's decision, though remarkably out of step with the nation's mood, couldn't have been better timed. Tomorrow's the Fourth of July. Happy Independence Day. May our founding truths glow as brightly as our fireworks.
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