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FREEDOM WATCH
Supreme Court ducks on Pledge
BY HARVEY A. SILVERGLATE
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You read it here first. This spring ("Freedom Watch," This Just In, April 2), we noted two approaches the US Supreme Court might use to wiggle out of deciding whether including the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance qualifies as an unconstitutional "establishment" of religion under the First Amendment. And they indeed took one of those routes to avoid ruling on the constitutionality of the Pledge as currently written. The matter under review was the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ controversial ruling in favor of atheist Michael Newdow, who sued California schools objecting to his daughter’s having to recite the Pledge’s "One nation, under God" line. The Ninth Circuit agreed with Newdow that requiring schoolchildren to recite "under God" does indeed violate the ban on state establishment of religion, and the school district appealed to the Supreme Court. In our analysis of the case, we wrote: "There’s one wrinkle: Michael Newdow never married his daughter’s mother, and the mother’s legal custody gives her, not the father, control over the child’s spiritual and educational life. The [Supreme Court] could rule that the father has no legal standing to sue, thus wiping out the Court of Appeals’ decision without having to decide the constitutional issue. That disposition would probably be technically correct." In fact, this is precisely what the Supreme Court did this past Monday. In Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, the court reversed the Ninth Circuit’s controversial opinion on the ground that the father had no standing to bring the challenge in the first place. This does not end the controversy; other parents with the requisite legal standing will almost certainly raise the issue again. But for now the spiritual/patriotic wars over God-in-the-Pledge are off the front burner.
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