Pharyngula

Growing bolder in Boulder

Posted by PZ Myers on September 28, 2007
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Oh, to be young again and brave: I’m impressed with these high school students who protested the American loyalty oath to a god:

About 50 Boulder High School students walked out of class Thursday to protest the daily reading of the Pledge of Allegiance and recited their own version, omitting “one nation, under God.”

The students say the phrase violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

Back in my high school days, I simply quietly refused to say the pledge, and didn’t make an issue of it. It’s a sign of progress that now students will make their protests loud and unavoidable.

Dare I hope that more students across the country will take some inspiration from this act?

There’s also a video of the students! There are also the usual suspects: the young Neandertal who thinks that if you won’t recite the pledge, you ought to leave the country, and the blinkered administrator who isn’t going to change his dogma. Otherwise, though, look at the smart students standing up for their rights — those are the ones who matter.

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Comments

  1. #1 David Marjanovi?
    September 28, 2007

    As a European I find this whole pledge reciting thing rather odd. We do not have it here in Europe but does anyone really think that the French, Spanish, Germans, British, Irish etc are any less patriotic than Americans ?

    Oh yes. Very few of them will consider “my country right or wrong” even thinkable.

    Except the Germans. They consider it thinkable — and run screaming from that thought. See comment 45.

    Only the Swiss are proud to be Swiss, and even that only as long as you don’t ask them if they don’t actually mean “happy” rather than “proud”. Oh, and I’ve met one Polish patriot. Recent events also let me suppose that there are some left in the Balkans…

    Where are you from?

    When I was in high school, for reasons unknown, they started playing a recording of the Lord’s Prayer after the national anthem every morning – I’m in Canada BTW, no pledge of allegiance.

    National anthem every morning?!? WTF?

  2. #2 David Marjanovi?
    September 28, 2007

    Under a less political-historical definition of Europe, I’m obliged to mention the Putin Youth. Sick, sick, sick.