[freedom watch] Taking the Pledge in Brookline
A kerfuffle has arisen of late, concerning an effort by a
group of Brookline citizens, led by attorney Martin Rosenthal (disclosure: a
long-time friend of mine), to get the school committee to ban the organized recitation
of the Pledge of Allegiance in the town's public schools, in favor of pledging
in less pressured and conformity-inducing settings than classrooms. It began
with a page-one banner in the Boston
Herald on September 8: BROOKLINE MOONBATS AT IT AGAIN: NOW THEY WANT TO BAN THE PLEDGE! The next day, the
Herald quoted
Governor Deval Patrick as demurring: "I don't have to have an opinion on
everything." The Boston
Globe seemed likewise not to jump too heavily into the fray; it felt
comfortable taking a both-sides-have-merit editorial approach and pronouncing
as "eminently reasonable" what it called "the compromise in place right now."
That "compromise" - that teachers will lead students in
pledging, but that participation remains voluntary - is not quite the result of
bargaining by both sides. There are the traditionalists who feel that it is
only fitting that schoolchildren be led in pledging before school begins. And
then there are those who deem such a pledge to be anathema to students' freedom
from being coerced into engaging in a patriotic exercise. But the argument is
truly over very little, since one of the most important decisions ever to
emerge from the US Supreme Court on the scope of the First Amendment's
protections has already sharply limited state laws requiring the pledge.
The applicable Massachusetts
statute requires that each school committee provide a flag for every school
room where "opening exercises" are held, and that teachers lead their classes
in pledging each morning. The statute's command, however, is limited by the
Supreme Court's instruction in West
Virginia Board of Education vs. Barnette, handed down in 1943. In that
case, a Jehovah's Witness child refused to pledge, arguing that such obeisance
to a flag - any flag
- violated a strict reading of the Biblical injunction against idol worship. The
student risked being thrown out of school and exposing his parents to criminal
penalties. That was a much tougher sanction than the one that the Massachusetts statute provides for Bay State
teachers who refuse to lead their classes in saying the pledge: a fine of up to
five dollars for each consecutive two weeks that the teacher remains
recalcitrant. (The Massachusetts
statute provides no penalty at all for students who refuse to pledge.)
The high court, citing the First Amendment's rights of free
speech and religion, as well as the inferred right of private conscience,
struck down the part of the West Virginia law that required students to pledge
and penalized refusal; the Barnette child thus was permitted to remain silent
while his classmates pledged. Wisely recognizing the intensity of disagreement
over the issue of enforced patriotism even during a global war, the court
instructed that the "freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not
matter much," for "that would be a mere shadow of freedom."
And so there is not really much left for the good citizens of Brookline to fight over.
The sole point of contention appears to be that the anti-pledge group feels
that even a voluntary exercise entails a degree of coercion on children who do
not wish to pledge but might be hesitant to say so. But in a free nation, where
such patriotic exercises are completely voluntary, it surely is not asking too
much of a young citizen to exercise the rights conferred on him or her by the
Constitution and simply to sit out the pledge. It is good training for
potential dissenters.
Harvey Silverglate is the author of Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, released this past June in paperback from Encounter Books.