The Unconstitutionality of the Pledge

Sometime near the beginning of my senior year at UCSD, I found a table on Library Walk for College Republicans and asked when their next meeting was. I decided to attend at least one meeting, since after all, I am a registered Republican, and in a handful of issues I am very, very conservative. I was also a Ron Paul supporter, and I was anxious to know how well the mainstream right was progressing in issues like war and political authority.

So I arrived on the night they were meeting, and the very first thing we did after reorganizing the chairs to form a big circle was to stand and face a flag that a man had pulled from his bag, put our right hands over our hearts, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I myself abstained from placing my hand over my heart and from saying a single word of the pledge, though I did stand out of some combination of respect and fear.

There are some words in the Pledge of Allegiance that I have a moral opposition to. Granted, I am a little put off by the phrase "under God". Does it mean that God chose this nation to be better than all the others? Does it mean that everything our leaders do happens to be condoned by God? Does it mean that acceptance of God's authority necessitates acceptance of the U.S. government's authority? Does it mean that we all have a national duty to worship a Biblical God? But that isn't what bothers me most. I can live with a little religious ambiguity. What bothers me most, and what I find to be inconsistent with both the United States Constitution and fundamental moral principles, is the phrase "On Nation, Indivisible".

The Right to Secede is a basic human right that belongs not just to the states, but to counties and cities within the states, to neighborhoods and to households, and to mere individuals. It was the Right to Secede that our forefathers claimed when they wrote: "it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another". The Declaration of Independence was in every sense a declaration of the right to secede. When a man insists that we are bound perpetually in union with "one nation, indivisible", he denies the very principle on which our nation is supposed to have been founded. He basically says that we should stay loyal to the government no matter how high its taxes, unnecessary its wars, or brutal its so-called "justice".

The U.S. Constitution puts no limit on the states' or the people's Right to Secede, and so we can infer from the Tenth Amendment that the Right to Secede, which the Constitution does not prohibit to the states, is reserved for the states or the people. The Right to Secede is then a Constitutional right. Any law or government action prohibiting secession simply because it is secession is a denial of a Constitutional freedom, and any statement in denial of the Right to Secede is a statement in denial of the Constitution. Of course, the Constitution doesn't have any moral authority anyway, but it is nice to see statists trapped in their own words. If they are patriots, then surely they love "freedom" and the Constitution. If they love those two things, then surely they must give the Constitution the meaning that is most conducive to freedom. And if they do that, then they must acknowledge that no body of people is bound for all eternity to bow to some organization that calls itself "the United States Government".

Individual Sovereignty, Free Association, and the Inalienability of Will are three fundamental moral principles that undergird (or at least, they SHOULD undergird) our laws. It wouldn't make much sense to say on the one hand that every one of us is endowed with certain inalienable rights, among them Liberty, while on the other hand saying that a man is bound to stay in a relationship that he no longer wants to be in. A man who no longer wants to attend the Catholic Church shouldn't be forced to attend it. A woman who no longer wants to live with or have sex with her husband shouldn't be forced to live with or have sex with him. The bottom line is that we shouldn't be forced to do things that we don't want to do, even if we used to like doing them, and to force a man to do something he no longer wants to do is to make a slave of him. The fact that a man used to love his government is no reason to force him to continue paying his taxes, or to obey other laws that he finds abhorrent or intrusive. Today, many people are forced to go along with and pay for things they don't approve of. "Political rape" is a good word for it. And it is this rape that self-styled "patriots" defend when they cover their hearts and say "One Nation, Indivisible".