I was 16 when President Eisenhower signed the bill altering our national patriotic creed, the one I had learned by rote and recited to start each day in public school. I objected then because it spoiled the metre and the meaning of that phrase "…one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all". As a personal protest I have recited the creed omitting those intrusive words ever since.

I am not an atheist. My relationship to my God is personal and direct. God needs no rote recitation to cement our interactions. I ask now, as I asked then, just who's God is this nation under?

Not the God of "GOTT MITT UNS" surely. Pat Robertson's God is foreign to my understanding. Is it Jimmy Swiggart's God of the House of the Rising Sun worshipped in the shadows of a French Quarter Saturday Night? Is it the God whose communion is served by pederast priests? Or perhaps the God of Mohammed Atta?

This part of our national scripture was written in the closing years of the aftermath of our Civil War, ordained by man and consecrated by Congress to commemorate the closing of our division. It was not ordained by anyone's God nor even by our Founders. It was a Congressional Afterthought, an expression of our national will not to be again sundered.

With the late addition of the Eisenhower codicil and conversion of it to a sectarian creed the Pledge lost its core purpose and became an instrument of division, a test oath proclaiming a religious nationalism in which conscience did not permit me to participate.

I see the Pledge now as an instrument of the division we pledged not to again permit, setting each of us apart from the other as conscience may give each of us to recognize our own God as directing our national purpose. It will now be seized upon by the minions of sectarianism, the spiritual brothers of the Taliban, as a new instrument of coercion to the nation's discredit.

It would have been better that the Court had left it alone, meaningless words recited without thought or purpose. Instead it has been re-created as a new instrument of indoctrination alien to American liberty of conscience