Respect and allegiance are not generated in the human
heart by force.
Love, friendship, respect, trust and allegiance must be
earned.
When force or coercion is applied to those objectives the
result is often exactly the opposite of that intended.
That’s why I find it particularly disgusting and
offensive when statist government agents of the United States of America take
it upon themselves to force little children in compulsory education public
schools to stand and recite in unison on a daily basis the Pledge of Allegiance
to the Flag.
Of course, federal law and several Supreme Court
decisions provide that students may not be compelled to recite the pledge but
that is of little value when peer and social pressure is employed by the trampling
school house mob to coerce compliance and conformance from everyone upon
penalty of ostracize.
A lone child refusing to stand and recite the pledge together
with the rest of the class will soon become about as popular as a turd in a
picnic basket.
Enidris Siurano Rodríguez, a 15 year-old Puerto Rican sophomore
at Damascus High School in Montgomery County in Maryland, was actually chastised
and punished by her school for refusing
to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.
This young lady has protested U.S. policy on Puerto Rico
since she was in seventh grade by silently sitting during the daily Pledge of
Allegiance. "I do not agree with the way the United States treats
Puerto Rico... I think Puerto Rico has an undemocratic situation, I dislike the
idea that a government so far [from the island] tells us what we can and cannot
do,” she says.
That is her fundamental constitutional right or free
speech under the First Amendment.
Last month she was asked to stand for he pledge by a
teacher and complied under duress before being called to the principal’s office
to discuss the matter. School administrators dismissed her protest and,
belittled her ethnic background.
The next day she was told again to stand for the Pledge,
but she refused – and was confronted by a different teacher who took issue with
her protest, telling her that her actions were an insult to the military and
military families.
The United States of America got along just fine without
a pledge of allegiance to the flag from its inception in the 1776 Declaration
of Independence right up until the mid twentieth century, at least 166 years.
Those years mark the halcyon period in America when its inhabitants enjoyed far
more freedom and liberty than we enjoy today.
The American government didn’t feel the need to require a
coerced loyalty oath from its citizens then. But in 1892, Francis Bellamy, a
socialist Baptist minister, came up with a grand idea for a pledge of allegiance
which was later published in a popular children’s magazine.
The idea was to instill American nationalism in kids.
His pledge has been changed four times since then. In the
year 1942, while WWII raged, the pledge was adopted by the U.S. Congress, and
since then has become as ubiquitous in American public schools and other
government settings as Hitler’s Nazi Youth forced pledge of allegiance during
the Third Reich.
In 1954, during the height of the cold war with “godless”
communist Russia, Congress and President Eisenhower took the unconstitutional
step of changing the pledge of allegiance to add the words “under God” by
federal law in blatant violation of the First Amendment Establishment Clause.
The pledge of allegiance – a statist government loyalty
oath -- has been forced down the throats of American school children in one
form or another now for the last 70 years.
The United States government is not content that children,
forced to attend public school within a compulsory education system, be free to
make up their own minds and conscience about how to feel about their country.
It wants to make that decision for them before they even begin to understand
the nature of a pledge or the meaning of the word allegiance.
The pledge of allegiance flies in the face of liberty, freedom
of conscience and the First Amendment. It is an odious government inspired ritual
of which little kids are forced to recite mindlessly every school day long
before they’ve acquired any working knowledge of American history or any reason
why they should owe any allegiance to a government which looks upon them as
virtual slaves.
If it is not a sham, a hoax, the very antitheses of
liberty, and all of the valuable benefits of America that our founding fathers
envisioned for us, then why does the present day government see fit to require
its recitation every day, day after day during all of the formative years of
every child’s life?
It’s a classic text book case of ritualistic brainwashing
-- forced allegiance.
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