The headline on a March 25 Boston Globe article by staffer Douglas Belkin read DEBATE OF HATE. The piece’s subject was the refusal by the selectmen in the town of Hamilton — which Belkin called "this community of horse farms and dignified prosperity" — "to sign a pledge against hatred, already approved in 54 Massachusetts communities." The selectmen, the Globe reported, "are the first municipal leaders in the state to turn down the feel-good program designed by the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish organization that battles anti-Semitism." The Board instead turned the issue over for debate by the annual town meeting, set for May 6.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) program’s goal, according to Belkin, is "to bring people from various groups together, prompt them to think about diversity and tolerance, and then take action by sponsoring art shows, essay contests, and the like." The ADL provides resources to a participating town, but "the municipal leadership must first officially proclaim its community No Place For Hate." Candy Wheeler, Hamilton’s town manager, is quoted as justifying the selectmen’s obdurate refusal to buy into the ADL program: "The board members are what I’d call strict constructivists," she said. "They don’t think it’s their job to approve anybody’s private agenda."

Wheeler’s phrasing, as quoted, may leave something to be desired (she likely meant "constructionists," and even that’s not quite the right term), but in terms of constitutional law, she was more on the nose than either the ADL or the Globe. The paper’s editors didn’t bother consulting legal experts, who presumably would have told them that requiring any American citizen to "sign a pledge" for or against any ideological or political position — whether it be love or hate, tolerance or bigotry, patriotism or criticism of America — is patently unconstitutional. McCarthy-era America was infamous for such attempts to divide loyal Americans from presumed traitors by imposing mandatory oaths of allegiance. But the US Supreme Court has been consistent, across a variety of contexts, in making sure America has no official orthodoxies.

In 1943, the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional for a public school system to require children to pledge allegiance to the American flag. In that case — decided in the middle of World War II when the premium on patriotic observance was at its zenith — Justice Robert Jackson, writing for a majority of the justices, pointed out that in our free society, it is not within the power of the state to force a citizen (in this case, a Jehovah’s Witness child) "to declare a belief [and] ... to utter what is not in his mind."

"Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard," he concluded.

In the 1969 case of Stanley v. Georgia, the court held that the state could not interfere with what literature citizens read in the privacy of their homes, even if it’s otherwise illegal obscene material. "Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds."

In 1977, the court ruled, in Wooley v. Maynard, that New Hampshire couldn’t force citizens to display the state motto, "Live Free or Die," on their license plates. "The right of freedom of thought ... includes both the right to speak freely and the right to refrain from speaking at all."

And in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), the court held that state-sponsored prayer in schools violated the First Amendment because it interfered with an "individual’s freedom to believe, to worship, and to express himself in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience."

The Anti-Defamation League and its supporters might think that "diversity and tolerance" are sufficiently politically correct to justify the town government’s use of coercion to establish them as the official civic creed of Hamilton. But the First Amendment provides otherwise. It is one thing — and perfectly proper — to outlaw the commission of acts of bigotry. It is un-American and un-constitutional, however, to demand that citizens take a pledge for diversity and tolerance — or for any other philosophy. Besides, there is a genuine debate raging over whether the "diversity" touted in such campaigns is simply the notion that people should look different but all think alike. But that’s another issue.