BAGLEY: Forcing Kids to Say Pledge Is the Type of 'Patriotism' Hitler Insisted Upon
By Will Bagley
The Salt Lake Tribune
Mormons still recall the suffering that haunted much of their church's early history. The realities of this persecution seems to have been lost with one state senator.
Societies so obsessed with conformity and enforced patriotism that they passed laws requiring citizens to swear fealty to a symbol like a flag include Nazi Germany and Singapore. And, if state Sen. Chris Buttars has his way, Utah.
The Romans destroyed the Jewish nation twice because its people would not worship Roman icons. A modern religious minority also suffered for refusing to bow down before a false idol.
Jehovah's Witnesses refuse to swear allegiance to anyone or anything but God. They consider pledging to a symbol like a flag as great a sin as worshipping idols with the heads of cats and the bodies of reptiles.
One of Adolf Hitler's first acts upon seizing power was to ban the Jehovah's Witnesses. Members had to wear purple armbands and thousands were arrested as "dangerous" traitors because they refused to serve in Nazi armies or pledge their loyalty to the Third Reich. Ultimately, 203 of them were executed and 635 died in concentration camps.
To show support for German Witnesses in 1935, 12-year-old Lillian and 10-year-old Billy Gobitas of Minersville, Pa., refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. For this, the children were ridiculed and stoned, expelled from school. The town's largest church boycotted the family business.
Their father sued, and the Gobitas' case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which made one of its worst decisions. "National unity is the basis of national security," Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, and "the flag is a symbol of our national unity."
Remarkably, the high court agreed to hear another case raising the same issues only three years later. What had happened?
Many Americans did not say the pledge with their hands over their hearts in 1940. Instead, they raised their right arm just as Nazis in giving their palm salute while chanting "Sieg Heil." Pearl Harbor and images of thousands of Nazis worshipping the swastika and pledging loyalty to Hitler gave the Supreme Court a chilling new perspective on totalitarianism.
The Gobitas children returned to Washington to hear the arguments in West Virginia v. Barnette, which still sets the limits of compelled speech.
"Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good as well as by evil men," wrote Justice Robert Jackson. Such efforts had proved futile ever since the Romans tried "to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of its pagan unity."
In a reference to events in Germany, Jackson warned, "Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. . . . If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism [or] religion."
Letting dissenting high schoolers in Utah sit out the pledge might appear to make salute-or-else legislation fair, but consider the Texas children who recently refused to join in Baptist prayers and faced "persistent verbal harassment, with pushing and shoving, over issues of religion in the public school."
Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court had to protect the rights of these young Mormons.
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Will Bagley's ancestors were cobblers who were boycotted by their English neighbors after joining the LDS Church.