IRVINE, CA--The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was right to strike the phrase "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance, said Robert Tracinski, a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. Robert W. Tracinski was a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute between 1997 and 2004.
"The inclusion of God in the Pledge of Allegiance, added by Congress sixty-two years after the pledge was first written, constitutes a government endorsement of religion, and therefore violates a crucial element of the Founders' legacy: the separation of church and state."
More ominous, Tracinski notes, are the arguments used by politicians on both the right and the left to condemn the court's ruling. "President Bush has said that the religious pledge is necessary to promote the nations' close relationship with the Almighty.' By putting God into the Pledge of Allegiance, Bush and others want, in effect, to make the individual's adherence to religion a test of his allegiance to the United States. But this is precisely the kind of intrusion into intellectual freedom that America's Founders considered anathema."
Tracinski warned that in today's context "the President's idea that the government should concern itself with "the nation's relationship with God" is not only mistaken, but dangerous, for it is precisely the view embraced by our Islamic enemies in the current War on Terrorism."