The school board in the largest city in North Dakota voted last week to do away with reciting the Pledge of Allegiance before its meetings. According to The Forum, the Fargo School Board voted 7-2 to scrap the recitation, saying the pledge does not line up with the district’s diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, values.
The problem with the pledge, which Fargo students will continue to say in schools as the ruling applies to only board meetings, is the word “God.” The big hangup is that the word is capitalized, which the board claims is exclusionary.
Board member Seth Holden, who pushed for the change, said, “Given that the word ‘God’ in the text of the Pledge of Allegiance is capitalized, the text is clearly referring to the Judeo-Christian god and therefore, it does not include any other face such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, all of which are practiced by our staff and students at FPS,” adding that atheists would also be excluded from the “non-inclusionary act” of reciting the pledge.
Opponents of the change said those who sought to end the ritual were “misinterpreting” the pledge.
Former board member David Paulson, said, “The pledge isn’t a show of our patriotism, it’s an affirmation of our commitment and our loyalty to the greater cause, and that greater cause is freedom.”
The Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy and finally tweaked and adopted by Congress in 1942. In 1954, under President Dwight Eisenhower, the phrase “under God” was added to the text — at about the same time that “In God We Trust” became the national motto.
The North Dakota dustup isn’t the first time government entities have been forced to debate the pledge controversy. The phrase “under God” has been at the center of several lawsuits with legal battles going as high as the Supreme Court, which preserved the phrase in its 2004 decision in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow. That ruling overturned a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that said teachers leading the pledge was a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.
Federal courts have also ruled that schools cannot compel students to recite the pledge or salute the flag.