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"Under God": Why is TOC Pandering to Bigots? Theoretically, if the parents don't like what is done in government schools, they may pay a private school to educate their child instead. However, private school tuition is often beyond the means of parents burdened with tens of thousands of dollars in taxes each year, including thousands of dollars in taxes for government schools, which parents are forced to pay even if they sent their children elsewhere. The combination of tax laws and compulsory attendance laws forces many children into government schools. Schools below the university level are run by local school boards. School board members carry out the will of the voters, many of whom, in any place outside a few university towns, are religious bigots. So, in spite of our constitutional prohibition against the establishment of religion, many government school boards open their sessions with prayers to God, and are not about to tolerate atheists in "their" schools. Bigots on school boards hire bigots as school administrators and teachers. Bigoted teachers encourage bigoted bullies to "teach those deprived of God at home to fear God in school". But first, they need to find out exactly which children are the atheists to be beaten. Which is where the "Pledge of Allegiance" comes in. The "Pledge of Allegiance" is the first thing that American children learn when they start school. In most schools every school day begins with a recitation of the Pledge. This custom started in 1892, and was established by law in 1942. In 1954 Congress, in order to "to deny the atheistic and materialistic concepts of communism," inserted the words "under God" into the previously secular Pledge. In its current form, it reads: "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation, Under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all." In this form, the Pledge functions as a test for "outing" atheist children. A child who likes the idea of "Liberty and Justice for all" but not the "under God" part won't say that phrase. And, if his teacher is a bigot - which is not at all unusual - the fact that the child failed to move his lips in unison with the class when the class was saying "under God" will not pass undiscussed. And the Christian bullies will interpret the teacher's diatribes against the atheist child as a license to teach that child "the fear of God", in or out of school. The forms of verbal abuse to which bigoted teachers subject atheist children in America speak volumes about the mentality of bigots. When Ron Merrill, the author of "The Ideas of Ayn Rand", died of cancer, the expenses of his final illness forced his widow to transfer their children to government schools. His children were soon "outed" by the Pledge of Allegiance, and his son became the subject of repulsive anti-atheist diatribes by one of his teachers. When I became Brian Merrill's stepfather, I tried to bring the inappropriateness of such diatribes to the attention of school administrators - and was told that I needed to be "more tolerant of the teacher's freedom of speech." Brian looks a lot like his father, and not at all like me. Apparently not realizing that I was Brian's stepfather, the teacher devoted his next diatribe to the thesis that atheist women, presumably meaning Brian's mother, lacking fear of God were all engaged in adultery and their children were bastards. Finally, in 2002, the "under God" phrase was challenged by Dr. Michael Newdow, a parent in California. That was almost five decades after the phrase was inserted into the Pledge in 1954, and non-Americans may wonder why it took so long. For a society supposedly based on individual rights, the United States places remarkably few limits on the exercise of arbitrary power by school boards and other local government agencies. We live without Ombudsmen, without Human Rights Commissioners. Some federal agencies have an Inspector General, and some states have State Controllers who monitor compliance with the Constitution and the laws, but no such officers exist in local government. When schools break the law, parents have no recourse short of filing a law suit. And law suits are very expensive. This expense is compounded by legal doctrines that exempt government agencies, including school boards, from paying the plaintiff's costs even when the plaintiff "wins". So parents who can afford a law suit have a quicker solution, and one less destructive of their children's well-being: they can, for less money, transfer their child to a private school that will treat them as paying customers. Other parents, too impoverished by taxation to afford either a lawsuit or private school for their children, have no recourse at all. Dr. Newdow is a physician, a well-rewarded profession in America, and therefore wealthy enough to send his child to a private school. But Dr. Newdow's young daughter is in the custody of her mother, apparently a fan of government schooling, who enrolled her in a government school. When the school began to test Dr. Newdow's daughter on the pledge, her parents - like any atheist parents - were forced to make a choice between the integrity and honesty they were teaching to their child, and the child's personal safety if the child were "outed" as an atheist in the school. If Dr. Newdow had had custody, he could have transferred his child to a private school - but he didn't have custody of his child. The mother, understandably concerned for the child's safety, told her daughter to solemnly pledge a lie: to say "under God" as if the child believed it. Dr. Newdow was outraged, and sued. The Federal Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit eventually agreed with Dr. Newdow's request to remove "under God" from the pledge. The verdict was stayed pending the government's appeal to the Supreme Court. On reading the various comments written by our theocratic conservatives after the 9th Circuit first ruled on the case in July 2002, it is difficult to tell what exercised the conservatives more: that the government was actually told to abide by the constitution, or that an atheist protested when deprived of the right to teach honesty and integrity to his child. The central belief of the bigots is that virtue and ethics can only be based on belief in and fear of God; an atheist's claim to be teaching virtues to his child is not to be believed. Instead, Dr. Newdow was just exploiting his daughter in the interests of a more nefarious agenda. One such op-ed on the Newdow case, published on July 18, 2002, asserted that "in this context the establishment clause has been mustered to duty as an ideological muffler." Then the usual lies - that atheist families subjected to the tender mercies of bigoted teachers and schoolyard bullies have all the freedom necessary to debate the propriety of "one nation under God", without fear of violent reprisal. And yet, they employ courts and a zero-tolerance attitude toward religious utterances in schools -- melodramatic and intellectually shortsighted methods of debate. Such an approach transforms the simplicity of the establishment clause into a weapon of the thought police.As for Objectivist children who exercise the virtue of integrity and refuse to say "under God" in the pledge, they are silly: since they don't believe in God, their claim to integrity is just empty posturing. After all, being forced to say "one nation under God" does not, in the author's words, "compel faith," so why the fuss? And, if for their integrity our children are abused and assaulted by bigots, it is their own fault: they are "Modern-day, would-be Galileos" who "position themselves in gallows of their own construction." Such a screed would be a cause for outrage even if it had come from the website of a Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. Unfortunately, it came from neither. It was written by Tim Richmond, a writer for The Objectivist Center, and published on the Objectivist Center website. Personally, I have enough disagreements with Leonard Peikoff to feel distinctly unwelcome when browsing the ARI web pages, but the ARI op-ed on the same decision, "Take God Out Of The Pledge Of Allegiance," is both sensible and honest. What is it that makes Objectivist Center op-eds so often so horrid - and in the case of Tim Richmond's, stupid and obscene? Just a month ago, I attended this year's TOC Advanced Seminar. It was the intellectual high point of my year, nay, of the decade. The quality of scholarly work from David Kelley, Will Thomas, and other TOC scholars is uniformly superb, in bright contrast to the infrequent and imitative output of their ARI counterparts. The TOC people are doing important, innovative work in crucial areas of philosophy. So why are their op-eds so, well, un-Objectivist? I should note that I first became aware of the Tim Richmond op-ed in March 2003, and immediately alerted David Kelley. Receiving no response, I discussed it privately with him during the Advanced Seminar last month. On July 21, I finally received a reply - and I have never read a letter that worked so strenuously hard at avoiding the most remote possibility of moral judgement. Ultimately, questions of ethics are questions of fact: what is good, and what is bad for my life? It is good for my life to listen to challenging ideas, to consider them seriously, to use them in my own eternal hunt after contradictions in my own ideas - the hunt that constitutes intellectual integrity, by which I am building me a soul. When choosing what to read, I prefer to read books that disagree with ideas I already hold. If someone agrees too much with me, it is because he thinks mostly things I have already thought. If he disagrees, that means that he experienced events and thoughts that I haven't, and so I might learn something new. The human mind evolved from the same fact. It either is challenged - or bored. Ayn Rand never wrote a paragraph that did not challenge and re-arrange some part of the reader's mind. ARI tries to follow her lead. They are not always successful. Sometimes, their radicalism gets forced, almost a parody of the real thing. But they grab the reader's attention. They engage the reader's mind. And they never pander to evil. TOC op-eds are the very opposite of Ayn Rand's radicalism. They try their utmost to avoid moral judgement - even when moral judgement is precisely what the reader is most starved for and most desperately wants to find. They are inoffensive, conventional, bland and ignored. They try very hard to find something reasonable in the most unreasonable positions of the most unreasonable of men, including the bigots who claim that we owe them tolerance to abuse our children. This will not lead unreasonable men to reason, but it has led at least one reasonable man to feeling disgust. Because pandering to bigots, even in the name of tolerance, is evil. Ultimately, questions of ethics are questions of fact: what is good, and what is bad for my life? Tolerance is good for my life in dealing with new ideas that I have not confronted before. Tolerance is bad for my life when it demands continuing, dishonest respect for hypotheses already disconfirmed, for ideas already falsified. And tolerance is evil when it is used to excuse the demand, of intolerant men, that I live my life in accordance with their judgement instead of my own. Some evils, like the evil of forcing children to pledge their honor to lies, are too evil to tolerate - and advocates of toleration do toleration no favor by advocating that I tolerate them. No, I am not going to deprive myself of the pleasures of TOC seminars, or of the work of TOC scholars, just to avoid that ARI bugaboo of "giving sanction to evil." But I am not going to tolerate evil either, and I shall keep wishing that TOC didn't.
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