In his massive work, A History of the American People, British historian Paul Johnson observed that American history raises some of the most fundamental questions of meaning and morality. The first question Johnson identified was whether a nation can “rise above the injustices of its origins and, by its moral purpose and performance, atone for them?”

Alan Cooperman of The Washington Post reports Wednesday that the federal government will pay for the rebuilding of “parochial schools, nursing homes and similar religious institutions,” but not for the rebuilding of church buildings used for worship.

Just a couple of weeks ago, David Savage of The Los Angeles Times wrote a most interesting article on Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion on demand. The article seems to have attracted little attention, and that is a shame.

As reported yesterday, Harriet Miers is member of Valley View Christian Church in Dallas, Texas. President Bush’s most recent nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court has attracted a great deal of media attention, and at least to major newspapers have published articles on her Christian faith.

President George W. Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers as the new associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court caught almost everyone by surprise. After all, Harriet Miers was — at least until yesterday — relatively unknown outside of the White House. Given the importance of this nomination, observers were left wondering what the President was signaling by his choice of Miers.

When the constitutional framers established the Supreme Court as the third branch of America’s government, they left the role of the Court largely undefined and unfinished. In recent years, the Court has taken on an entirely new importance, with a majority of justices pushing an activist agenda that now assumes a legislative responsibility–encroaching on the constitutional powers of Congress and the President.

Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court is a master wordsmith. Just take a look at this excerpt from a speech he recently presented in California:
Now the Senate is looking for moderate judges, mainstream judges. What in the world is a moderate interpretation of a constitutional text? Halfway between what it says and what we’d like it to say?
Exactly! Once interpretation is liberated from the actual text, and its controls, it inevitably slides into “what we’d like it to say.” That’s true of interpreting any text, of course — the Bible included.
From National Review, September 26, 2005, page 6.

My commentary for today, “Is the Pledge of Allegiance Unconstitutional?,” deals with the meaning of Judge Lawrence Karlton’s ruling that the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in the public schools is unconstitutional. The fallout from this ridiculous ruling will reverberate for months, at the very least. We must watch this case closely as it slowly heads for the U.S. Supreme Court.
PLEDGE ATTENTION TO THE LINKS: The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, BBC News, ABC News, The Washington Times, The Washington Post, American Center for Law and Justice, Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

A federal judge in Sacramento ruled Wednesday that it is unconstitutional to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools. U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled that the pledge’s reference to one nation “under God” violates the right of children in the public schools to be “free from a coercive requirement to affirm God.” Once again, the driving force behind this case is Michael Newdow–the atheist attorney and medical doctor who won a similar decision at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2002.

In “The Court, the Constitution, and the Culture of Freedom,” Peter Berkowitz argues that an expansive concept of human liberty lies behind the Supreme Court’s tradition of jurisprudence. He goes on to argue that this progressive understanding of human freedom is likely to mean that the nation’s high court will one day decide that access to same-sex marriage is nothing less than a right guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution.