Prolific local blogger Bora Coturnix reveals the back story to the recent CitizenWill post North Carolina Diktat: Thou Shalt Pledge Allegiance.
His son was the young student, armed with the courage of his convictions, who calmly asserted his Constitutional right to not be compelled to affirm that which he doesn’t believe.
North Carolina’s motto, roughly translated, is “Deeds, not words.”
Many of the worst scoundrels of recent history have falsely pledged to support and maintain our Constitution. False pledges of allegiance and broken oaths of fealty are part-n-parcel of their way of doing business. Their deeds, though, contradict their words.
Yet many continue to put faith in mere words. I’ll put my faith in demonstrable deeds (like, as Bora points out, Paul Leubke’s lone dissent).
As famed champion of free speech Supreme Justice Learned Hand notes “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”
In a week so far filled with false patriotic platitudes, it’s encouraging to see the spirit behind the words of our Constitution firmly lodged in the hearts of our youth.
Bora, please thank your son for “walking-the-walk” – putting deeds to words – in pursuit of a little liberty.
I think Mark Twain nailed in back in 1907:
“This chief point of importance relates to citizenship. Citizenship? We have none! In place of it we teach patriotism which Samuel Johnson said a hundred and forty or a hundred and fifty years ago was the last refuge of the scoundrel — and I believe that he was right. I remember when I was a boy I heard repeated and repeated time and time again the phrase, ‘My country, right or wrong, my country!’ How absolutely absurd is such an idea. How absolutely absurd to teach this idea to the youth of the country….
“Yet to-day in the public schools we teach our children to salute the flag, and this is our idea of instilling in them patriotism. And this so-called patriotism we mistake for citizenship; but if there is a stain on that flag it ought not to be honored, even if it is our flag. The true citizenship is to protect the flag from dishonor — to make it the emblem of a nation that is known to all nations as true and honest and honorable. And we should forever forget that old phrase — ‘My country, right or wrong, my country!'”