Also this issue: Cover the Uninsured Tens of millions of people in this country have no health care. -Lauren Townsend Block Aid -Howard Altman Letters to the Editor

March 6-12, 2003

loose canon

Pissing Match

by Bruce Schimmel

Isn't it a great country, where momentous debates of significant constitutional import can be set into motion by a personal pissing match? And I'm not talking about Bush and Saddam at least not directly.

The debate at issue is whether we should or shouldn't: Should we keep the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, or should the Supreme Being be permanently excused from this most contentious of daily schoolhouse vows?

The pissing match that put this question on the court's docket and into the national consciousness started as a private battle between the divorced parents of an 8-year-old California girl.

Her dad, an atheist, says the child shouldn't have to say the Pledge; her mother, who has sole custody and who describes herself as a Christian, wants the kid to keep on vowing.

Lord knows -- or not, depending on your belief -- what this child's life must be like.

As of this week, the federal Ninth Circuit Court upheld the ruling that schools are not permitted to require students even to listen to the Pledge if it includes the phrase "under God."

So at school, thanks to her dad, the little girl will not even hear -- much less be forced to utter -- the name of the Big Guy. Which makes one wonder what her mom must be doing with her at home to counterbalance this supposed ignominy.

So who says the personal isn't political, and the political personal? Here's the whole nasty cultural war that has been dividing the country reduced to a domestic squabble over the vows of a child. A fight between feuding parents over a little girl who's likely as confused as the rest of the country over where her loyalties should lie.

The personal has been writ huge, the political shrunk to the size of a child's divided heart. And you thought Shakespeare was just kidding when he portrayed the fight between Titania and Oberon over a child as a threat to the order of the universe.

To be sure, the current squabble between the atheist dad and the Christian mom needs to be settled, or at least mediated, so that the rest of this divided country might find some way of getting along.

Still I feel for the little girl. Because her parents wanted a poster child, she's missing out on the happiness of childhood. It's sad her peace is being sacrificed because both parties are willing to go to war to prove a point. It's a plight that's all too familiar to anyone trapped in a conflict over which they have little control.