Today I've retweeted a bunch of people telling stories about what happened to them when they declined to say the Pledge of Allegiance. It illustrates my discomfort with the pledge. I think this intolerance is a feature, not a bug.
/1
/2 Plenty of people say the pledge with love of America in their hearts. But plenty of people -- many of them teachers and administrators -- seem to view it as a way to separate out who belongs and who doesn't, to demand conformity and identify those who don't conform.
/3 Think how often you've seen people get furious that some people don't join a ritual, unison statement of devotion to freedom. Does that make sense? Or does it show the purpose -- at least for many Americans -- is enforcing ideological and cultural conformity?
/4 Note that many of the people who are enraged that some don't say the pledge are also people who are offended by "virtue signaling" and concerned that schools are indoctrinating children.
/5 Humans tilt towards tribalism and bullying. The natural and probable consequence of ritual statements of belief is to single out, and identify for bullying, those who don't join. Why do we accept that natural consequence isn't the intent?
/6 I started being uncomfortable with the pledge while studying for confirmation in the Catholic church. A nun asked me what "saying the Lord's name in vain" -- prohibited by a commandment -- meant. I said swearing using God's name.
/7 I'll never forget what the nun said. She said that the commandment means invoking God's name for our purposes rather than His glory. "Under God" was, as I learned, explicitly added to the pledge to crow that Communists are ungodly and we are godly. Is that for God's glory?
/8 My later studies of American history only confirmed this -- particularly learning about the mostly-forgotten persecution of Jehova's Witnesses that weaponized the pledge. You hear echoes of those 1940s mobs in the sneers of the people in the picture above.
/9 Pledge-or-GTFO are not the only people who think this way. @TheFIREorg, for instance, has documented some truly disturbing demands for ritual conformities in the academic context. But this is the most common and loudly demanded one.
/10 Moreover, the pledge is constantly forced to violate the rights of young people 79 years after the Supreme Court said they can't be forced to say it. It's the handmaiden of contempt for constitutional rights and the rule of law, cloaked in supposed devotion to them.
/11 Even when kids aren't forced to say it, many states have laws that seem calculated to identify who belongs and who doesn't -- like laws saying parents have to sign a permission slip to let a kid abstain. What a perfect way to identify outsiders, and to coerce conformity.
/12 All of us, in our lizard brains, hate and fear the Other. America is supposed to be a collection of ideals, many yet unachieved, transcending the lizard brain. Paying lip service to liberty and justice while working to enforce conformity is incomprehensible to me. /end
/13 Coda: If you want to learn more about the persecution of Jehova's Witnesses, its ties to the Pledge of Allegiance, and how it led to the "fighting words" doctrine, you might enjoy this.
—Popehat
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1491862605010399267.html