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McCook Gazette

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Editorial

Pledge only important if students understand, support Constitution

Friday, April 13, 2012
McCook Daily Gazette

How do you vote against the Pledge of Allegiance?

Most officials can't, hence the new procedure at McCook City Council meetings, added to a prayer, when the clergy person assigned the task remembers to make it to the meeting.

Today, the State Board of Education was to decide whether to hold hearings on a proposal to require all classrooms, kindergarten through 12th grade, to recite the pledge of allegiance daily in the presence of an American flag.

Five of the eight members of the state board favor the rule.

Nebraska legislators considered a similar bill this year, supported unanimously by the state board of education, but it didn't make it out of the education committee.

The proposal is modeled after a 2002 New Hampshire law that was upheld by a federal appeals court, but the Nebraska chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is predictably cautious.

"Schools should do everything they can to inspire patriotism," said Laurel Marsh, executive director of ACLU Nebraska. "But you cannot coerce patriotism."

Requiring recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance might or might not have the desired effect -- we wonder how much meaning the words will have the 180th time they are repeated each year.

Whether or not the state decides to require the daily pledge, it can never be as important as ensuring that students learn the U.S. Constitution and their responsibility to support its guarantees of individual rights.

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  • Perhaps our students need learn that what they recite is a 'Pledge,' not a recital of words without meaning, and much bloodshed to make that 'Pledge' worthy of daily recital.

    As a child, in the 1940's, we recited the Pledge, of Allegiance, because as citizens of this Great Country, we have a natural or implied allegiance, to this country, no other. Somehow, through the system of Political Correctness, someone has decided that no one need have allegiance to this country, only to be ready to take from it what can be taken, even if it breaks the system, and it is just fine to maintain total allegiance to the very country they may have run away from, for whatever reason of less than what can be gained here, as what we call, 'Americans.'

    Additional memory reminds me that as a child, it was not just the government that made us recite the Pledge of Allegiance, but our Parents would tan the hinder parts, if they knew we had not 'Recited,' Proudly, the 'Pledge.'

    The younger generations have forgotten Pride in country. We older folk only need remember the missing body parts on those who returned from War.

    The ACLU is misnamed, and should have been named 'American Civil Allegiance Union' ACAU. Perhaps the organization would then have Patriotic focus. IMHO.

    -- Posted by Navyblue on Fri, Apr 13, 2012, at 10:23 PM
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