By John Brummett

There’s a 10-year-old lad, a fifth-grader at West Fork Elementary, who decided he wasn’t going to say the Pledge of Allegiance at school anymore because there was no liberty or justice for all in America, as the pledge’s rote recitation asserts.

He’d concluded that gay people didn’t get equal justice or liberty in this country and that he was loath to mouth something suggesting they did.

That is to say the boy was thoughtful, sensitive, courageous and free.

So his class had a substitute teacher who bugged the boy for not standing. She told him he ought to get up and say the pledge.

The youngster didn’t care for being nagged, and he snapped. He told the substitute teacher to go jump off a bridge.

Then the substitute teacher sent him to the office where the principal did not coerce or punish him in regard to the pledge, but did assign him, on account of his sassing the teacher, to do a report on the history of the pledge and the symbolism of the flag.

Let me help the youngster.

The Pledge of Allegiance was cooked up by a Baptist fellow in 1892 and subsequently promoted in youth publications for recitation by school children. It is, of course, not anything our founders envisioned and is, in fact, kind of antithetical to our very principle of constitutionally guaranteed liberty.

You cannot force somebody to promise fealty in this gloriously free country.

Having our little kids stand up in public school and salute a piece of cloth to vow faithfulness to their nation is harmless in nearly all cases, like a rhythmic and memorized child’s prayer before meals or at bedtime.

But a mass forced pledging of nationalistic allegiance is, when you really think about it, a perversion of the greater notion that we love and support our country by our own choice and for the very freedoms it grants us, including the freedom not to have to spew officially required words or mantras or chants.

I’m not saying we need to stop the rote practice each morning in our schools. I’m just saying we should leave a 10-year-old alone if he doesn’t participate.

I am proud of the free-thinking young man. I am pleased that the principal did not discipline him for free thinking, but for the ill-advised suggestion that the substitute teacher take a long walk off a short bridge. And I forgive the substitute teacher, who, after all, was but a substitute. Goodness knows that substitute teachers often walk into difficult situations.

Actually, I’ve been pondering an all-American compromise. The boy could stand up and say his own freely expressed pledge.

Rather than pledge allegiance to the flag and to the republic for which it stands, he might say, “I offer my voluntary loving support for my free country and the republic for which this flag stands.”

Rather than say “one nation under God, indivisible,” he could say, “one nation, not subject to anyone’s forced religion, and where the right-wing Texas governor was free even to intimate his state’s secession.”

Rather than say “with liberty and justice for all,” he could say, “with liberty and justice for many people, but, sadly as yet, not gays or lesbians.”

That ought to satisfy everybody.

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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.