There’s a good article titled The Battle Over the Pledge by Elisabeth Sifton over at The Nation.com that I thought was a pretty good read.
Overall I think she did a pretty good job of highlighting the issues and the distortions on both sides of the Pledge debate, though I was a little annoyed at the rather large brush she painted atheists with. For example at one point she offers up the following comment:
True, the Founders believed that all humanity lived “under God,“ but, as Jackson knew and evidently Douglas did not, as people of faith know and evidently atheists do not, this abstract deism in no way resembles the belief that God created the United States and speaks through its institutions. As good eighteenth-century deists the Founders respected the concept of an Almighty Being under whose aegis and according to whose laws the world turns, but they risked their lives for the principle of government created not by divine powers but by ordinary people using their human intelligence and reason. The US Constitution and Bill of Rights, which never mention God, are the great and crowning glories of the secular Enlightenment.
I would argue she has her groups mixed up. In general, atheists are more likely than most people of faith to be familiar with what the Founding Fathers said and wrote about the concepts of God and government. Indeed, I’ve put forth the same argument she provides above here on SEB many times before. I suspect she’s allowing her image of atheists in general to be tainted by the Michael Newdows amongst us. That said, I also agree with her opinion that “the Pledge deserves to be shorn of its quasi-sacrosanct status as well as of the ‘under God’ phrase” rather than banning it outright from use in public schools.
I’ve said before that Michael Newdow wouldn’t be my first choice to argue an issue such as the Pledge to the Supreme Court in part because he’s in many ways as much a Fundamentalist in his atheism as any Christian Fundy I know, but he’s been the first to get the issue this far and I suppose I’ll just have to live with it. In principle I agree with what he’s challenging, but I don’t necessarily agree with all of his arguments and I worry on the outcome of the trial as a result.
Posted on 03/19/2004 at 12:30 PM 
Great article. It provides the insight to exactly what I’m afraid of in this upcoming Supreme Court decision. Heh heh, I can’t wait to see the comments for THIS article…