What is THIS?????

[sugar and spice]

Originally posted by MereMere21
I could really give a shit if someone wants to say the pledge or not - its their right not to say it, but don't take it away from everyone else simply because you don't believe in God, or A God or Allah or any other higher being.

And herein lies the dilemma:

If you remove the Pledge from schools, nothing bad happens. Nobody is made to feel left out because of it, nobody is ostracized, teased or threatened. And the people who really want to say it, believe in its values and love what it stands for can say it whenever they want -- at home, walking down the street, in church, at the mall, wherever they want. Nobody's "taking the Pledge away" from anybody else, because they can still say it whenever they want. Hell, they can still even say it at school if they want to! There's just no organized time for it where everybody is expected to stand up and say it.

If you force kids who don't believe in the Pledge to say it, people are made to feel left out, teased and possibly threatened.

So the safest solution -- the one most conducive to an uninterrupted learning environment -- is not to have the Pledge. That, I think, is the issue at hand. The schools aren't trying to be unpatriotic, they're trying to make it easier for teachers to do their job without having to worry about hurt feelings, breaking up fights, name-calling, kids calling other kids terrorists, whatever. And considering how many side issues beyond teaching that teachers have to deal with already, it seems fair that we should try to avoid adding more of them to the list.