Note that the pledge does not require you to agree with any particular government policy, but rather to basic staples of our system, like “one nation, undivided” and “liberty and justice for all.” Forget the God-part if that troubles you so much.

You complain “What happened to freedom of conscience?” The answer is nothing. No one is impinging on your conscience. You are free to say or not say the pledge. Stop being so whiny.

You also wrote that “The voice of conscience can be safely ignored when it speaks to concerns like capital punishment, or torture, or war, or pledging allegiance to the flag.” Really? So you’ve never heard of CNN, MSNBC, The Washigton Post, or The New York Times? They haven’t addressed these issues? Come on, stop feeling so put on.

So if you don’t want to say the pledge then fine, don’t say it. But do grow a backbone and get tough.

Now have a nice day.

One of the points in my post, though, was that, in this poll I wrote about, a majority of Republican respondents as well as half of Democratic respondents, thought that schoolchildren from grades kindergarten through high school *should* be required to say it. Obviously, they would not be jailed for refusing to say it, but neither would pharmacists be jailed for refusing to fill a prescription. The point in both cases is that people are being forced to be bound by the personal political and/or religious beliefs of others.

And while people may have disagreements about the proper role of the public schools in socialization of children, when I read statements like:

It appears, however, that conscience only matters to the extent that it adheres to neoconservative and right-wing Republican orthodoxy. The voice of conscience can be safely ignored when it speaks to concerns like capital punishment, or torture, or war, or pledging allegiance to the flag,

I think about all of the conservative sites which allow commenter dissent, I reflect about the cries of our friends on the left that the Patriot Act was tantamount to fascism yet no one was ever arrested under it for speaking his mind, and I recognize that for all of the claims that we evil conservatives want to have a fascist dictatorship in this country, we just had a perfectly free election in which the party in power, the party which was accused of being fascist, lost, and that the President accused of being a dictator will peacefully hand over power to his duly elected successor on January 20th.

I do like your idea of it being a Loyalty Oath. I hadn’t viewed it that way.