For decades I didn’t say those two words.

In a book I have of SCOTUS rulings I looked up the two Jehovah Witness SCOTUS Pledge rulings, 1940 and 1943. The first required JW kids to pledge or be expelled. Many were expelled and their JW 9parents were prosecuted because their children were not in school. JWs started their own schools and there was so much anti-JW violence that in ‘43 SCOTUS reversed the ‘40 ruling.

The 1940 ruling said the Pledge’s purpose is to bring children into the political community so I stopped pledging, partly to protest America foreign policy interference in elections in many nations. We aided any anti-communist ruler, no matter how tyrannical. I saw 9/11 as a long-delayed revenge.

The ‘40 ruling then helped me persuade a Toastmasters club of mostly retirement-age war veterans to stop pledging. I now remain seated, as a Florida school case allows kids to do.

Justice Robert Jackson’s words became famous:
“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

That’s the one I use, if any. Atheist’s I’ve known refer to what we have now as The Prayer of Allegiance. All part of our war on those godless communists! Even back then - the Republican’s led the charge! Now that crap is on our money, too … though I’d posted a god-free bill ..printed before it - like that pledge