September 14, about the future of the United States after a federal judge ruled that reciting "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is "unconstitutional."
The Washington based Becket Fund for Religious Liberty said it will appeal Wednesday’s ruling by Judge Lawrence Karlton of Sacramento, California, because millions of school children recite the Pledge every day.
"To protect the right for every child to recite the Pledge, we will immediately appeal this decision to the 9th Circuit," said Derek L. Gaubatz, Director of Litigation for The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.
The Becket Fund said it would fight on behalf of 10 California public school students, their parents, "and approximately 1.7 million members of the Knights of Columbus."
In Wednesday’s criticized ruling, Judge Karlton condemned a school district’s policy requiring the Pledge with the "one nation under God" phrase as "an unconstitutional violation of the children’s right to be free from a coercive requirement to affirm God."
ATHEIST LAWYER
The case was brought by Michael Newdow, a Californian atheist who has previously sued to challenge the use of the phrase. Last year, the US Supreme Court vacated a lower court decision that said a California school district violated the Constitution’s separation of church and state by requiring teachers to lead the Pledge of Allegiance.
The judges did not decide whether the Pledge was constitutional, but said Newdow could not challenge its phrase "under God" on behalf of his daughter because he did not have full legal control over her.
Newdow, a lawyer, immediately filed a new federal case in which he reportedly offered to represent two families against the Elk Grove Unified School District, the same Sacramento-area district he had previously sued.
LEGAL TROUBLES CLEARED
With the legal stumbling blocks apparently cleared, judge Karlton said he could do nothing else than reconfirming the initial ruling by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals based in San Francisco which, he said, "held that the school policy mandating the pledge is unconstitutional." Newdow did not immediately answer questions of reporters following the ruling.
"If we ever needed [Supreme Court Chief Justice nominee] John Roberts and another Justice just like him to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor,in the US Supreme Court it is now," said Brannon Howse, co-host of Christian Worldview This Week, a radio broadcast aired on 225 networks each week.
"If Americans continue to allow humanistic liberals to kick God out of our country, the foundation of our freedoms will be destroyed. Our end will be as President Ronald Reagan warned: "If we ever forget that we are one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under,"" he said. (With BosNewsLife Research, BosNewsLife News Center and reports from the United States).
