I know that many of the Christians among you aren't going to like this...

...but Michael Newdow is in the right.

Yes, I know that this throws me in the vast minority in this country. Yes, I realize that if you polled the American public on whether or not the Pledge of Allegiance is "constitutional" about 80% would say that it is. I am aware that this is a nation where the majority of the public are Christian. But let us get one thing straight from from the outset; the United States of America is not a federation of Christian states. That's right, this is not a Christian nation. If you have any difficulty in understanding why this is not a Christian nation (nor is it a Jewish nation, a Moslem nation, a Buddhist nation nor a Sikh nation, and so on), I suggest you find a copy of the Constitution, with its amendments, and read that first amendment.

Do you see that bit about "mak(ing) no law respecting the establishment of religion"? We see that, right? Well, when you make a law in 1954 which alters the existing Pledge of Allegiance to read that we're "one nation, under God," this means that the Congress has declared a particular religious bent that is over this nation. This would be a monotheistic religious tradition that refers to their deity as "God". It could be Christian, it could be Judaism, possibly even Islam. However, that means the flag isn't a symbol of a nation under Zeus, under Shiva, under Osirus; but under God. This is a very specific religion or group of religions.

Let's go further, to the specific case in question. It deals with a law in the state of California that requires school children to recite this promise to ally themselves to the flag this nation that is under God. Now this is not the law in Ohio, appearant, as I had Jehovah's Witness classmates who were not required to recite the Pledge, though they were required to stand for it. But the point is that you're asking kids who do not believe in God to make an oath to the flag of a Christian nation (as defined by the words that Congress added into the Pledge in 1954).

Yes, these children, and their families, are a vast minority in this country. However, and this is very important, our country was designed to protect the rights of the minority. When the Pilgrims loaded up onto the Mayflower in the summer of 1620 and embarked on their journey across the Atlantic, they did so because they were a religious minority in England. They believed that the Church of England was a corrupt body headed by a corrupt monarch. They wanted to "purify" the church by removing the hierarchical control that went from priest to bishop to the Archbishop of Canterbury to the King/Queen of England. This is why they were called "Puritans". And to ensure that this group remained a vast minority in England, the monarchs stated that any heresy (meaning any worship that was not Church of England rite) was punishable by death. This minority had to worship in secret, and they had to move their meeting places around in order to avoid detection. Finally they were able to pool the money needed to flee England in search of religious freedom.

And the Puritans/Pilgrims were not the only religious minority that fled from England for religious freedom. There were also the English Catholics, who lost any chance that Catholicism would be re-established in England with the establishment of the Stuart dynasty. Later, there were the Quakers, who fled to Penn's colony. Scottish Calvinist and Knoxists fled to Virginia. French Protestants fled to South Carolina in the wake of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. These minorities came to the British colonies in the Americas because the monarch didn't care about their heresies being committed over here; it was so much "out of sight, out of mind." And when the colonies achieved their independence 150 years later, they realized that it was because of their ancestors being in the minority, and their ancestors' persecution, that the rights of the religious minorities needed to be protected.

Sure, in 1788 the "Founding Fathers" may not have anticipated Chinese Buddhists or Indian Hindis living within their nation. There were Jews who were here, however. Some of them helped to finance the Revolution, even. And even though though they could have created a nation that respected God as the ultimate authority in this nation without stepping on the toes of any of the colonists, Christians or Jews, they chose not to. And these were people who believed that their belief in a single God separated them from the "savage" native Americans. Yet they protected their rights to be polytheists by not establishing the United States as a monotheist nation "under God".

The ultimate irony in this all is that when Iraq wanted to include language in their constitution that would recognize Islam as the basis of their laws, many Americans bristled at the thought. Many US citizens (rightly) oppose the establishment of Sharia law in Iraq and elsewhere. Yet when it comes to supporting something that clearly proclaims the United States as "one nation, under God," they have no problem dragging out the "but we're a Christian nation," argument; as if that is any different from recognizing Islam as the basis of your nation's laws in your constitution. It's yet another case of US citizens asking the world to do one thing (not establish Islam as the state religion, nor recognize the influence of Islam on the laws of the nation) and doing the opposite (recognizing the US as "one nation, under God").

Michael Newdow isn't just standing up for the rights of atheists to be free of religion in the public sphere. He's also standing up for the rights of Hindis, Buddhists, and believers in a multitude of other religious traditions from making a declaration that they are allied to a flag and a nation under a God in whom they do not believe. Some of us who hold different beliefs do not mind making such a declaration because we don't believe that our dieties will hold these false declarations against us, while others feel that their deities will, and it is for their protection that those two words added in 1954 must be struck down. Otherwise we may as well hang a sign on the nation that reads, "only Christians need apply" and alter the words of Emma Lazarus to read, "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled Christian masses, yearning to breathe free of godlessness."