I’m not now nor have I ever been an “America: Love it or leave it guy.” And while I’m not going to run through all of the platitudes about how America should welcome everybody, that doesn’t mean I don’t generally agree with those platitudes. Nonetheless, there’s a difference between saying that we should welcome or even accomodate everybody and saying that we should rewrite the social charter so it’s pleasing to whoever complains the most.

Michael A. Newdow is, I believe, a very smart crank. Although Linda Greehouse would have us believe he’s something of a demigod. Regardless, Newdow’s assault on the Pledge of Allegiance depends on the criticism that any public recognition of God is unacceptably tyrranical. Here’s an exchange, recounted by Greenhouse, between Justice Souter and Newdow from yesterday hearing:

Justice Souter’s question for Dr. Newdow was whether, even assuming that schoolchildren were being asked “as a technical matter” to make a personal religious affirmation, the recitation had become in practice “so tepid, so diluted, so far, let’s say, from a compulsory prayer that in fact it should be, in effect, beneath the constitutional radar.” Was it the case, Justice Souter asked, that by “the way we live and think and work in schools and in civic society in which the pledge is made, that whatever is distinctively religious as an affirmation is simply lost?”
Dr. Newdow replied: “That is a view that you may choose to take and the majority of Americans may choose to take. But it’s not the view I take, and when I see the flag and I think of pledging allegiance, it’s like I’m getting slapped in the face every time, bam, you know, `this is a nation under God, your religious belief system is wrong.’ “

“I, I, I.” You get the sense this all about Newdow? Remember this isn’t even a case about what the pledge does to him, it’s supposed to be about what the pledge does to his daughter.

I’m sorry but this country may have been established to protect individual rights, but it wasn’t founded to cater to the feelings of every individual. Newdow is unconcerned by the fact that if he got his way he’d be slapping, literally, hundreds of millions of Americans in the face. He thinks that’s fair because of his ego and because his capacity for abstraction affords him the ability to shove his head up his own butt and mistake the darkness for a temple of reason.

If he feels so strongly about the oppressiveness of the pledge, he can do what billions of others living under tyranny have done: Move. He can crabwalk himself, head firmly implanted in his temple of reason, to France or New Zealand or any other place else where he can live in freedom.