Just barely under God

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This week, a five-member majority of the Supreme Court, presumably sensitive to the public outrage that would greet such a controversial decision in a presidential election year, refused to rule on the question of whether the Constitution allows public school students to voluntarily utter the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.

The justices reversed the anti-Pledge ruling of a lower court on technical grounds, leaving for another day the underlying issue.

It will return -- and soon -- because the liberal judges who control our courts have long been laying the precedents to expel God from our public life and our law. If enough constitutionalists are not confirmed to the courts to stop them, this era will see the formal and final divorce in the 2,000-year marriage of law and morality.

This is the marriage that begat American freedom.

"And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and for all times, and there will be one master and one rule, that is, God, over us all, for He is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge." So wrote the Roman Senator Cicero a generation before Christ.

Almost two millennia after the fall of the Roman Republic, Thomas Jefferson, citing Cicero as an inspiration, wrote the words that gave birth to the American Republic. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," said Jefferson, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."

The same Congress that approved the First Amendment, guaranteeing the free exercise of religion, asked President George Washington to declare a "day of public thanksgiving and prayer." Washington complied, urging Americans to acknowledge the "many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness."

Two centuries later, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. invoked the Founding Fathers' commitment to a republic founded on God's law in demanding an end to segregation.

"We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands," said King.

"A just law" -- insisted this 20th-century Baptist civil rights leader, citing St. Thomas Aquinas, a 13th-century Catholic monk -- "is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God."