American Ayatollahs

By Crispin Sartwell

On April 30, the Bush administration appealed to the Supreme Court to defend the constitutional legitimacy of the phrase "under God" in the pledge of allegiance, on the grounds that requiring students to recite that phrase merely acknowledges the "religious heritage, foundation, and character of this Nation."

That the United States is a theocracy may seem obvious to amateur American ayatollahs like John Ashcroft, but it would have come as an unpleasant surprise to such notorious religious skeptics and lusty blasphemers as Tom Paine, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. It would even have taken aback the devout Christians among the founding fathers, who realized they were proposing to govern a nation that was founded largely as a shelter for religious dissenters, such as Puritans, Quakers, and Anabaptists.

Obviously there are a lot of folks in this country who do not call what they worship "God," preferring "Allah," "Krishna," or "the Tao," for example. And there are a lot of folks out here who, like Paine, don't worship anything and for whom it's against their religion - freedom - to require anyone to recite a loyalty oath, whether to a god or a government.