Sarah Palin and American History

A few years ago I asked a friend how many times the word "God" appeared in the Constitution. The reply was somewhat cryptic, but the gist was that he did indeed think that the Constitution was based on some version of "God's law."

Now, we have another instance of the failure of our public education system. On her questionaire for the Alaska gubernatorial * race in the 1990's, Sarah Palin responded thusly:

Question: Are you offended by the phrase “Under God” in the Pledge of
Allegiance? Why or why not?

Sarah Palin: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.

Yikes. The Pledge of Allegiance was not written until 1892, and furthermore, the words, "under God" were not added until 1954, during the Cold War fervor against those godless Communists.

I won't belabor the point too much, but this is the exact reason non-theists shudder when approached with candidates such as this who have little understanding of the purposes of the establishment of this great union, one of which was to protect the citizens from the tyranny of a religious majority. This is pretty basic nuts-and-bolts American history, so it begs the question, what else doesn't she know?

She's only been on the ticket a few days, and we're already finding a target rich environment for opinion pieces. Who the hell vetted her? Methinks this is looking more like John McCain's "Harriet Miers moment" with each passing hour.

And we haven't even heard her stance on foreign policy yet, so definitely stay tuned.

*N.B.: The link to the original questionaire has been mysteriously deleted and replaced with a link to the McCain campaign website-- which indicates that the deletion was done very recently and for a specific purpose. Shame.





(If someone has evidence that this characterization of Ms. Palin's ignorance is inaccurate, please let me know and I will gladly publish a retraction. The wording of the question sounds a little contrived but I have seen this referenced in several locations so I'll let it ride here until I have evidence to the contrary. Good lord, I hope I'm wrong about this.)