Patriotism can bring out the worst as well as the best in people, a fact displayed again this week by the Florida House of Representatives as it capitalized on current events to demand that the Pledge of Allegiance be recited daily in every school and to encourage student-led prayers. Both seriously offend the core freedoms that America is fighting to preserve.

The student-prayer bill, a perennial pest in Tallahassee, calls for the prayers to be "nonsectarian and nonproselytizing," which, of course, they will not be. When a majority of students are Christian, that's what the prayers will be, and to make non-Christian students submit to them as the price of -- for example -- attending their own graduations is fundamentally un-American. As several opponents noted, the House itself can't manage to keep its morning prayers nonsectarian despite a policy that says they will be, and its members are grown-ups who presumably understand what the word means. Two of the three prayers the House had heard during the session invoked the name of Jesus, and one of the members who deliberately gave such offense to his Jewish colleagues was the sponsor of the supposedly "nonsectarian" school prayer bill.

Freedom of religion is also offended by the mandatory Pledge of Allegiance. There are faiths, notably the Jehovah's Witnesses, that object to any obeisance other than to God, and the Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot be compelled to salute the flag. Though the bill allows children to be exempt "from reciting the pledge" at the request of their parents, they would still be required to stand with their hands over their hearts as others say it, and that, too, is plainly unconstitutional.

The House also accepted, but sent to committee, a bill that would require schools to read daily from the Declaration of Independence, and 76 members voted to hear legislation that is transparently aimed at firing teachers and professors who abuse "academic freedom," the ostensible subject of the bill, by failing to show "appropriate restraint" in what they say. Fortunately, those 76 -- all but one of whom were Republican -- weren't quite enough to introduce a bill outside the scope of the governor's special session proclamation.

The best that can be said of any of these bills is that the Senate is unlikely to consider them. The Legislature has enough to do with repairing the budget deficit, and teachers have enough to do without more rituals imposed from Tallahassee.

The House also acted to let homeowners fly "portable, removable" flags no matter what a homeowners' association's bylaws might say. No one paused to point out that such documents are contracts and that the Constitution normally forbids even the Florida Legislature from infringing on a contract. In this instance, however, the rights of free speech and expression clearly outweigh the contract rights of Pecksniffian neighborhood nannies.

The larger problem in the House is that most of its members don't appear to understand the democratic virtues they claim to be protecting, or to appreciate that required rituals are usually meaningless. It would behoove them to read from Justice Robert Jackson's memorable majority opinion in West Virginia State Board of Education vs. Barnette, the 1944 Jehovah's Witnesses flag salute case:

". . . To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.

"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not occur to us."

If none occurred during a war against the combined might of the Axis, surely none occurs now.

Back to Opinion

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright

From the Times
Opinion page