The collectivist Iowa GOP: Pledge allegiance to the government, or else

In their own minds, Iowa Republicans are on a mission to quash leftist ideology in the classroom. In reality, they are working to ensure there is more of it.

A bill filed in the Iowa Senate this month would require teachers to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s a follow-up to a bipartisan measure passed last year requiring schools to offer the pledge in classrooms each day but stopping short of mandating anyone to read it.

Under the legislation — introduced by State Sen. Adrian Dickey, R-Packwood — a teacher also could not “speak about the Pledge of Allegiance” in a way students could perceive as “an unpatriotic commentary.”

So teachers would not be able to tell their students the truth — that the Pledge of Allegiance is anything but patriotic. It is socialist drivel, a form of state idolatry and a condemnation of our nation’s individualist ideals.

The original version of the modern pledge was a ploy to sell more American flags to schools, with a dual purpose of ginning up nativist sentiment on the anniversary of Columbus arriving in the Americas. It was commissioned in the late 1800s by a children’s magazine and pedaled to school administrators.

The words were written by Francis Bellamy, an anti-immigrant Christian socialist who preached that Jesus too was a socialist. He was the cousin of Edward Bellamy, who inspired a movement of “Nationalist Clubs” that favored a government takeover of private industry.

“Under God” was famously added by Congress and President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, seen as posturing against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Even though the pledge got some anti-communist flare, that didn’t alter its collectivist essence.

The most common controversies over the Pledge of Allegiance relate to religious freedom claims and the “under God” line. Yet the most powerful rejections of compulsory pledges came a full decade before those words were added.

Public school students can’t be forced to salute the flag or recite the pledge, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. It was a landmark 1943 case that overturned a precedent from just a few years earlier.

“To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds,” Justice Robert Jackson wrote in the majority opinion.

Justices Hugo Black and William Douglas wrote in a concurring opinion, “Words uttered under coercion are proof of loyalty to nothing but self-interest. … These laws must, to be consistent with the First Amendment, permit the widest toleration of conflicting viewpoints consistent with a society of free men.”

Those old judges might as well have been speaking directly to Sen. Dickey, who almost 80 years later is seeking to entrench the “compulsory routine” of pledging allegiance in Iowa schools.

Since students are protected by court decisions from having to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, lawmakers think they have the next best thing, pinning teachers with the responsibility to model blind loyalty to the government. It’s a futile exercise in fake patriotism.

(319) 339-3156; adam.sullivan@thegazette.com