Immediately after the pledge decision, Democrats were quick to join DeLay. Daschle called it "just nuts." Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., called for a constitutional amendment to preserve the pledge. The Senate voted unanimously to condemn the decision. Conservatives aren't letting any of that stop them. "There's no question that Republicans devoutly, fervently want this to be a major issue and they want this to have an impact on the judicial selections process," says Ralph Neas, president of the civil liberties group People for the American Way. "But in order to have a genuine controversy, you have to have disagreement between the parties."

So while pundits obsess over an issue civil libertarians don't necessarily want to fight for, Neas despairs that the tempest is diverting attention from what he perceives as a more serious erosion in the separation of church and state. Specifically, the landmark ruling by a sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court held that public money can be used to underwrite tuition at religious schools, provided parents can choose among a range of religious and secular schools.

"This decision, which was a disaster, took a sledgehammer to the [constitution's] establishment clause," Neas says. The United States is at "our most dangerous moment in many, many decades. One or two more Scalias or Thomases on the Supreme Court and we will have a constitutional catastrophe." Compared to that, he said, schoolchildren reciting the words "under God" isn't a high priority right now.

People for the American Way is a staunch defender of the wall between religion and public life, but Neas says in this case, constitutional law isn't clear cut. Amazingly, both Neas and Concerned Women of America's LaRue cited the same justification for the pledge's legality -- what late liberal Justice William Brennan called "ceremonial deism."

"Various patriotic exercises and activities used in the public schools and elsewhere which, whatever may have been their origins, no longer have a religious purpose or meaning," Brennan wrote in a 1963 case. "The reference to divinity in the revised pledge of allegiance, for example, may merely recognize the historical fact that our nation was believed to have been founded 'under God.' Thus reciting the pledge may be no more of a religious exercise than the reading aloud of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which contains an allusion to the same historical fact."

That's not to say that opinion is unanimous against the authors of Wednesday's decision. Many legal scholars argue that, while the decision will probably not stand, given past Supreme Court rulings about religious coercion in public schools, the judges acted appropriately.

"I think the decision is built on a very firm chain of Supreme Court precedent striking down prayer in the classroom, at graduation ceremonies and in the football field. It has rejected the placement of the Ten Commandments in classrooms," says Jamin Raskin, a professor of constitutional law at American University and author of "We the Students," a book about students and constitutional rights. "If we could somehow drain the emotion from the discussion, the vast majority of people would see this as a perfectly logical and modest decision."

While Raskin supports what the appellate court did, he shares the worry that it's given ballast to conservatives. "There's no doubt that the Republican Party is using the 9th Circuit opinion to change the subject from the ethical collapse of corporate America," he says. "It's classic Republican politics where the flag and God are used to replace issues of immediate concern to peoples' lives. It's the temporary triumph of cheap symbolic politics over dealing with the nation's serious structural problems."

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