Ruminate

Before everyone drives me completely insane with their pissing and moaning, let’s get a few things straight about the Pledge of Allegiance.

1. First, the Founding Fathers would not have given a rat’s ass about this ruling. They would still be in shock that the Pledge contained the word God at all, given their explicit intention to keep the Constitution “God-free.” Even Benny Franklin’s idea to have a prayer each morning at the Constitutional convention was soundly defeated.
2. The above assumes that the Founding Fathers would still be able to think straight after being bludgeoned about the head with how shallow our concerns have become and that this is an issue, particularly given that
3. the words “Under God” were inserted less than fifty years ago during the worst of the McCarthy, Red Scare paranoia years, and that the insertion was clearly just an attempt to ride with the flow of religious fervor erupting against the atheist Commie heathens. This was
4. clearly an insertion meant only to promote and endorse religion, and this is clearly a violation of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 1971.
5. If the insertion didn’t mean anything, those who want to leave it in wouldn’t be bitching so loudly, would they?
6. Finally, if you believe that a child can “choose not to say the pledge” and that the atmosphere is not coercive, then I submit that you have become far too distanced from your own childhood… and the peer pressure in today’s society is even greater. The religious reference is an abomination, a clear coercion in a society where children routinely fail classes, drop out of school, turn to drugs and alcohol, and attempt suicide because of pressure from their peers.

Congress should do the right thing and remove the insertion whose time is well past. Barring that, it should be modified to say something like “One Nation under Krishna/Buddha/Zoroaster/Abraham/Moses/Christ/Muhammad/The Bab/Satan/A Divine, unknowable presece/Or Nothing at all, as the case may be” or something along those lines.

If you are running the Apache web server, it is imperative that you upgrade immediately because of a nasty security hole. This is a very easy bug to exploit. If you can’t upgrade your server and you are running mod_perl, then you might try this temporary fix.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,736501,00.html. Wow.

In theory, I’m not too worked up about the recent Supreme Court decision upholding school vouchers. In theory, families can use vouchers to send their children to any kind of school, and I am not against religion, just against religious discrimation. In this sense, Eugene Volokh’s assessment is perfectly reasonable.

But the reality is very different. Close to 90% of private schools are religious. Most families put their children in these schools for both the religious education and the general educational benefits inherent in smaller class sizes and dedicated teachers. There is no strong incentive for secular private schools because the public schools fulfill this purpose for practically all secular and non-denominationa families.

So, the real effect of this ruling is to take money from the schools that educate most of our children and funnel it directly into religious institutions. And I would bet that many of these institutions survive on the economic effects of the tax-exempt and otherwise tax-incentivized activities of the religious organizations that sponsor/operate/cooperate or otherwise are involved with them!

This is precisely why, even with this added incentive to found more non-religious private schools, it isnot going to happen. My only consolation is that these vouchers can–and I hope will–be used to subsidize children going to Muslim, Wiccan, Satanic, and other schools that will drive the sponsors crazy.

P.S. Of all the overblown political rhetoric, bringing up the idea of a constitutional amendment to enshrine religious rhetoric in the Pledge of Allegiance has to be one of the worst examples. Even considering an amendment regarding such trivialities cheapens the Constitution and everything it stands for.

I love “found photo” sites and archives. As Look At Me notes– they can’t help but be interesting! See also Object Not Found

When you get tired of reading that comic book, check out the Timeline of Sacred Texts, fully linked for your reading pleasure….

I am still alive and kicking, just too busy to attend to weblogging or the site revision I really need to make. Here are some random thoughts for today:

• Mozilla is probably going to become my new regular browser. Although not perfect, release 1.0 is very good, and I alway feel better when I get to break free of the Micro$oft yoke, even if only for a while (and despite the fact that IE 6 is probably their best product ever.
• I’m glad a couple of judges had the balls to stand up and say what should be obvious to everyone about the Pledge of Allegiance and religious influence in the schools. It’s clear what which God “One Nation Under God” is referring to, and if it weren’t the case, conservatives wouldn’t be wringing their hands about not having to say it. I’ll have more to say on this later, though I don’t expect this good, common sense ruling to stand.
• I must be in one of the smallest minorities in this Republican state since I am also against: drilling in ANWR and the ludicrous
  Missile Defense System.
• Ben Folds rocks, Rockin’ the Suburbs is layered in genius seven layers deep, and Still Fighting It is one of the strangest and most moving Father/Son kinds of songs I know of.