Legislator Wants Keystone State's Pledge Law Restored
by Jim Brown
March 19, 2004
(AgapePress) - A Pennsylvania lawmaker is hoping a federal appeals court will reverse a lower-court ruling and reinstate the Pledge of Allegiance law in that state.Last year, U.S. District Judge Robert Kelly nullified a state law that requires schools to display an American flag in each classroom and implement the Pledge of Allegiance or the national anthem daily. According to a Philadelphia Inquirer account, the federal judge found that the law violated students' First Amendment rights of free expression, and he described it as an improper attempt to circumvent a 60-year-old U.S. Supreme Court opinion that banned mandatory pledge recitations.
A three-judge panel of the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia recently heard arguments in the case and is expected to rule on the appeal in a few months.
State Representative Alan Egolf, who sponsored the Pledge legislation, was surprised by Kelly's decision to set the law aside and hopes the Third Circuit Court of Appeals will reverse the ruling. Egolf says the pledge law does not violate the First Amendment rights of students and teachers.
"What has been said in newspaper articles, unfortunately, has been incorrect. They're saying that this [law] mandates that children say the Pledge of Allegiance," Egolf says, "and it doesn't -- it just mandates that schools will have a flag in each classroom and provide either the Pledge or the national anthem at the beginning of the school day, and the kids can opt out."
The state lawmaker says the Pennsylvania Pledge case is emblematic of one of the biggest problems facing the United States -- activist judges making legislation rather than interpreting it. He believes many of the judges feel that legislating from the bench is their prerogative -- to change some law they dislike or with which they disagree by ruling against it.
"It doesn't matter if the people wanted it," Egolf says, "which, of course, our founders were very concerned about. They tried to keep our court system the least powerful branch [of government], but unfortunately it has turned around now and is doing exactly what they were afraid of."
Egolf says increasing judicial activism is an extremely dangerous trend nationwide -- a trend that, according to the Pennsylvania representative, began when Franklin D. Roosevelt packed the federal courts with judges who liked to legislate from the bench.
