Like millions of Americans, Sandy Banning strongly supports the Pledge of Allegiance. As a single mother, she encourages her 9-year-old daughter to participate in this familiar daily ritual at her child's public elementary school in suburban Sacramento. As Banning sees it, the pledge represents a succinct but powerful statement of the nation's foundational principles and values.
But her daughter's father, Michael Newdow, vehemently disagrees. In his view, the pledge's inclusion of the words "under God" violates the 1st Amendment's prohibition of the law "respecting an establishment of religion." So he went to court to ask that the offending phrase be removed.
The constitutionality of the pledge, at least in the public school setting, is now in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. We will presumably know the court's answer before its summer recess. The case is complicated by issues of "standing" -- that is, whether Newdow has the right to sue because child custody proceedings had awarded Banning the final say in the child's educational and religious training. But judging from the arguments in the court in late March, it is more likely that the justices will weigh -- and decide -- the underlying constitutional issue that divides the mother, a devout Christian, from the father, an ardent atheist.
Remarkably, in our closely divided nation, where the voting in a single state can decide the presidency, the American people have been overwhelmingly of one mind: The pledge is appropriate and unobjectionable. The virtual consensus of our vast representative democracy was reflected in the U.S. Senate's 99-0 vote disagreeing with the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals' invalidation of the pledge's inclusion of the words "under God."
Consensus, of course, doesn't translate automatically into constitutionality, and one of the glories of our system is the power of the Supreme Court to "say what the law is," in the words of Chief Justice John Marshall. But, in an otherwise divided nation, the nigh-universal acceptance of the pledge -- including the addition (in 1954) of the words "under God" -- will probably not go entirely unnoticed by the court as it comes to judgment.
