by Robert L. Maddox
1940 was a bad time to be a Jehovah's Witness.
In June that year the Supreme Court held 8-1 that a Pennsylvania school district could legally expel Jehovah's Witness children who refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or salute the flag.
The Witnesses were not trying to cause trouble, but as a religious group they sincerely believe that expressions of devotion to national symbols like the flag constitute a form of idolatry. They claimed a constitutional right not to do either. The justices of the high court rejected that argument and in the Minersville School District v. Gobitis decision they held that freedom of conscience must bend the knee to the rituals and symbols of national unity.
Far from instilling a feeling of national pride and love of country, the Gobitis decision in fact unleashed a frightful wave of intolerance and hate across America. Some segments of the population saw it as a Supreme Court-sanctioned "open season" on Witnesses. For three years the First Amendment was suspended for Jehovah's Witnesses, and a shameful chapter was written in American history.
In Richwood, W. Va., the chief of police and his deputy rounded up some Witnesses, forced them to drink castor oil and paraded them through the streets before running them out of town. In Jackson, Miss., members of a local veterans' organization attacked a trailer park where Witnesses lived and drove them out.
In Rockville, Md., police assisted a mob in breaking up a meeting of Witnesses. In Litchfield, Ill., townspeople attacked a group of Witnesses who were soliciting door to door. A Witness in Nebraska was lured from his home, dragged away and castrated. And in Kennebunk, Maine, a community adjacent to George Bush's Kennebunkport home, an unruly crowd charged the local Witness Meeting hall and burned it down.
In 1940, between June 12 (just nine days after the Gobitis decision was handed down) and June 20, hundreds of attacks on Jehovah's Witnesses were reported to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Fueled by superpatriotism local school district official in Michigan threatened to seize children from their Witness parents. Across the country Witness children were expelled from public schools and threatened with imprisonment in juvenile homes, only because they refused to salute the flag.
The Supreme Court soon realized its mistake. three years later the justices, in a dramatic reversal, overturned the Gobitis decision and ruled 6-3 that citizens could not be made to salute the flag if their consciences forbade it.
The West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette case said each individual is protected by the Constitution. As Justice Robert Jackson eloquently put it, "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
Forty-five years later the issues raised by Gobitis and Barnette have arisen again, this timed as an issue in the 1988 presidential campaign. It appears that the lessons of the 1940s have been overlooked.
Today politicians are using the Pledge of Allegiance as a political football. They either don't know or don't care about the power of the force they are playing with. In doing so they dishonor and endanger our constitutional heritage.
As Justice Jackson observed, "The very very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections."
In America, freedom of conscience means the right to some times go against the grain. It means the rights to be in the minority, even a minority of one. Caution must be taken to preserve the sacred rights of each person and to avoid fanning the flames of religious intolerance, especially in the name of patriotism.
I believe in the Pledge of Allegiance. I recite it with a feeling of awe for the wonderful privilege it is to be an American. But the pledge is mere words and the flag is just a square of cloth unless they stand for the great promise of America: the freedom of conscience for each individual.
The pledge speaks of a nation that seeks to guarantee "liberty and justice for all." Wouldn't it be ironic if that very pledge were used as a device to unjustly deny liberty for some?
Dr. Robert L. Maddox is executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
CHURCH & STATE OCTOBER 1988 Page 23 (215)