At my high school in New Mexico, a student (via loudpseaker) led the school in the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of third period. This job traditionally fell to the student council president, but the president my senior year from a peculiar form of stage fright that caused him to give the Pledge a different way every time he recited it, another council member took over. She did a much better job.

A.P. English was my third period class during my senior year. My classmates and I ignored the Pledge. My parents subscribed to the Kansas City Star via mail, and I brought in the comics pages so that we might read such "degenerate" strips as Doonesbury, Bloom County and the Far Side--all of which were far too "extreme" to be published in our local newspaper. My classmates and I spent the moments taken up by the Pledge and other sundry announcements reading the funnies and generally goofing off.

One day, the principal happened to walk by our classroom during the Pledge. And he got pissed off.

Maybe he was mad that his own daughter was laughing at Binkley's romantic ineptitude rather than holding her hand over her heart and Pledging like a good little girl. Maybe he'd been listening to too much Lee Greenwood. Hard to say. In any case, he told our teacher that we were setting a bad example for the school (he was known for his rather sizable leaps in logic) and that we were required to stand at attention and say the Pledge at the appropriate time. Our teacher, who was probably a bit more familiar with various Supreme court rulings, laid out the principal's edict and then told us that while we were under no obligation to say the Pledge, we'd really help her out if we didn't read the paper while the Pledge rang out over the loudspeaker.

So just for starters, I think it's obvious that the belief that students are free to not speak the Pledge is a big, fat load of shit.

That aside, my objection to the Pledge has nothing to do with "under God." I'm not one of those Madalyn Murray O'Hair or Bad Religion types of atheists. I happen to think that a good many religious folks have a semantic rather than truly philosophic difference with my particular point of view. I've got this desk calendar that gives me a shot a day from the Hubble space telescope. If you want to be humbled, take a look at gas discharges from supernovae that destroy untold numbers of stars without a second glance. Compared to anything earthly, the powers within the universe itself are indeed omnipotent and all-seeing. And, after all, the universe did create the Earth and all life upon the earth. So in many ways, I can come to an agreement with some of the more fantastic bits of religious myth. Fundamentalists or any folks with literal beliefs in fairy tales (okay, so maybe just a little bit of the Bad Religion, if you please)? Well, they're another story for another time.

I don't care about mentioning God at public functions. I don't care about nativity scenes on the courthouse lawn. I don't care about prayers before high school football games. I don't care about prayers at graduations. I find such rituals occasionally charming and often silly, but rarely offensive.

On the other hand, I find the rabid insistence on these rituals and totems (including keeping "under God" in the Pledge) rather amusing. When I was a well-churched little boy, I got hit with "in God's eyes, a thousand years is but a second" more than I care to remember. This was not only a sop to the scientific inevitability of evolution, but also a reminder that God was above petty earthly squabbles. And two words in the freakin' Pledge of Allegiance is nothing if not petty. These folks frothing at the mouth seem to be afraid that their God will be hurt if it is not mentioned in the Pledge. Doesn't say much for a supposedly omnipotent God.

And never mind that the arguments to keep God in the Pledge are absurd. In a recent column, ol' Bill Safire acknowledged that Michael Newdow was right to oppose the 1954 insertion of "under God" into the Pledge, and then proceeded to say that it ought to remain anyway due to its cultural significance. Antonin Scalia said much the same thing in a speech, which is why he isn't voting on this particular issue. These arguments are fatuous at best. For people who profess "strict constructionist" beliefs when it comes to deciding Constitutional issues, the notion of considering "cultural" arguments when making decisions is not only dumb but downright heretical. But like I always say, let sleeping hypocrises lie.

I oppose the Pledge on an entirely different level. I have no interest in pledging allegiance to a flag. I really don't care what a flag symbolizes; it's a piece of cloth, not an ideal worth defending with my life. I'll happily take a pledge like the one that the Prez gets to say every four years: to uphold the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic. This is not only because the Constitution doesn't mention God at all (except for "in the year of our Lord"), but because the Constitution--and not the Prez or Tom Cruise or Levis or whatever--is what defines our nation. Without the Constitution, the United States would not exist. I don't give much of a shit about burning the flag. Burn the Constitution, and I start to get pissed.

But that's just me. I'm not gonna tell my son Max to say the Pledge or not when he starts to go to school. He can decide on his own. That's his job. I don't say the Pledge, and I always hold my right hand in a fist (a la Tommie Smith and John Carlos, though I hold my hand behind my back and don't wear a black glove) whenever the national anthem is played. The Pledge and the Star-Spangled Banner mean very little to me, though I must admit on one level that it's cool that we have an old drinking song as a national anthem. The Constitution is what matters. It's why I'm proud to be an American. You write a pledge to the Constitution and I'll swear fealty every time. Even if I have to say "so help me God."

Jon Worley's parents are somewhat concerned that all their boys ended up atheists.