second of three

so where was i? oooh yah, the pledge of allegiance.

well you know how it is, one good turn deserves another, and so the ruling fills the folks on the other side full of piss and vinegar, which is to say that they're offended. they say things like the ruling is another step in a process that will deprive the faithful and devout of their freedoms, and that bad things are in store for the country because of yet another refusal on the part of the government to recognize the Almighty, or in any case a concept thereof. so naturally, they decide to fight it tooth and nail. all the way to the u.s. supreme court the case goes where it's thrown out on a technicality, as the court ruled that the guy who brought the case to the 9th circuit court didn't have the standing to press the case on his daughter's behalf. so "under God" gets to stay which, one might imagine, would have satisfied those conservative types of the mind of defending this sort of innocuous civil religion.

if one was imagining that, one might most definitely have been mistaken, because really it just seemed to piss them off, mostly because they didn't feel that it went far enough. they felt as though the case should have been judged by its merits and they wanted the supreme court to say definitively and unequvocally that the idea of taking "under God" out of the pledge of allegiance was without merit. the sentiment was that the supreme court had a chance to significantly reinforce, well i'm not actually at all sure what they wanted to reinforce beyond a sort of rubber stamp sanction of certain symbols that give people warm fuzzy feelings.

i say that mostly because when the judicial system has in the past ruled in favor of keeping those kinda phrases on national symbols the reason given in the majority opinions has been that those kind of phrases are nothing substantial when it comes to anything religious. don't tell that to any of the "under God" hawks though. to hear them tell it every time a tacit acknowledgement to God is taken from the repertoire of national symbols we're just spiraling further and further away from him, relentlessly sliding down the slippery slope of humanism, and relativism and any other bad -ism one would care to name or make up.

and people have very active imaginations.

feeling: like watching cartoons
thinking of: mexico
music: "took out the trash and i'm never coming back" mojo nixon