In Defense of “Under God" - Religious Freedom, Theocracy, and Me

Yes, this is me saying the Pledge. I don't know what my brother's doing.

"'What Better Work For One Who Loves Freedom Than the Job of Watchman. Law Is The Servant of Freedom. Freedom Without Limits Is Just A Word,' said Dorfl ponderously.

"'Y'know...if it doesn't work out, you could always get a job making fortune cookies.'"

~Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

I've always taken the Pledge of Allegiance very seriously. Perhaps it was the deep strain of solemn Phariseeism in me, but when other children mumbled and rolled their eyes through the pledge, I would slap my hand to my heart and tearfully proclaim my earnestness for Americanism and all it entailed.

I remember once, hearing a fellow pledger replace "liberty and justice for all" with a surreptitious "liberty and justice for most." How dare he? I fumed mentally. That's so disrespectful! If you're going to give your word, you should really mean it. There's some irony there, because his nicety should have force me to realize that all the time I had said the pledge, it had never occurred to me to ask that most relevant of questions: do I believe it?

And I wasn't sure.

The Free-Born Mind - Homeschooling and the Government

Many years ago, my dad was standing behind a lady in the grocery store. She had several children, and was asked where they went to school. “We homeschool,” she said.

Dad did a double-take. What was this…home school? He mentally separated the two words. Some sort of private school? But no. She meant, literally, school at home. In our small out-of-the-way country town, it was the first time my dad had even heard of another option.

Many years later, I sit here, a homeschool graduate. Needless to say, we now look on homeschooling quite differently than my dad did twenty years ago. We’ve had to get over the occasional “So are you going to homeschool them all the way through high school?” asked with an incredulous expression. There’s the one family member who insists on quizzing me and my siblings on various subjects. We endure our state senator calling us “a threat to what it means to be an American.” Still, it’s not like we’re being acted against legally. 

For the Romeike family, it’s another matter. In 2008, the family fled their home country, Germany, and received asylum in the U.S., but the Administration has overturned that decision. The Huffington Post writes:

“In Germany there is basically religious freedom, but it ends at least with teaching the children,” Uwe Romeike says in a video produced by the Home School Legal Defense Association, the Christian organization providing the family’s legal support.

…

The Romeike case is unusual in a system backlogged with people trying to escape violence and persecution. The Romeikes are comparatively well off, and come from a country that hosts more than twice as many refugees as the U.S. 

 But because they home-schooled their five children (a sixth was born in Tennessee), they faced high fines and tension with local authorities. At one point, police forcibly corralled the oldest children into a van and delivered them to school.