A father's pledge

"I won't get into the details," he said, but then he did, describing the day a decade ago when his ex-girlfriend got pregnant. "We were out camping, we were both naked, and I said: 'No, I don't want to. No, I don't want to,'" Newdow said. "The fact is, she knew that from the beginning, and I think she planned it, and I think that if I wasn't making 10 times as much money as she was, there's no way she ever would have had this kid."

A few minutes passed, and Newdow tried to rein himself in and make nice about the mother of his child. "She's a lovely person," he said. "She's very sweet, she's completely nonthreatening, she's lovely." But Newdow couldn't stop there; he kept going, and in the process ended up comparing her to a notorious California killer. "She's a nice person, she's friendly," he said. "But so is Cary Stayner."

The lawyers representing Newdow's former girlfriend in their custody dispute did not return calls for comment.

Newdow's rants may make it hard to like him -- don't get him started on how abortion rights give women an unfair advantage over men when it comes to handling unwanted pregnancies -- but they also make his journey to the Supreme Court all the more impressive. For four years, Newdow methodically litigated a constitutional challenge that virtually no one took seriously. An atheist jokingly ordained as a mail-order priest, Newdow contended that, by inserting the words "under God" into the pledge in 1954, and by requiring the teachers in his daughter's classrooms to lead the pledge each morning, Congress, the state of California and his daughter's school district violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

In 2002, Newdow won a major -- but ultimately temporary -- victory: Two of three judges on a Ninth Circuit panel agreed that the school district's policy violated the First Amendment.

The decision was condemned in God-fearing, bipartisan lockstep. The White House declared it "ridiculous," the Senate voted 99-0 in favor of a resolution of "support" for the pledge as written, and Antonin Scalia opined, in a speech to the Knights of Columbus on "Religious Freedom Day," that, while Congress was certainly free to remove the words "under God" from the pledge if it wished to do so -- and it plainly did not -- no court could make the change by "judicial fiat."

When the Supreme Court agreed to take the case, without Scalia, who recused himself upon Newdow's request, Newdow insisted on arguing it himself. And this March, he delivered what the New York Times called a "spellbinding" performance. For a half an hour of oral argument, Newdow was calm and in control, holding back his lesser angels just long enough to argue his case better than anyone else could have.

"I'd hate to have a lot of Newdow wannabes argue their own cases, because they're almost always a disaster," said Richard Lazarus, a former assistant to the solicitor general, who runs Georgetown University's Supreme Court Institute. "But for 30 minutes -- 30 minutes, not 31 -- Newdow very effectively put himself on check."

Next Page: "There isn't a screen between his emotions and his mouth"

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