July 27, 2017
We all recall starting each school day reciting the “Pledge of Allegiance.” The oath which we mindlessly repeated was originally written in 1892 by Reverend Francis Bellamy. It was adopted on a widespread basis to address American anxiety about whether the waves of European immigrants were sufficiently loyal to the United States and whether post-Civil War native born Americans were sufficiently loyal to one United States of America. (Source: “The Strange History Behind the Pledge of Allegiance,” Kelli Marshall, Talking Points Memo, 9/15/15). The words “under God” were added in 1954, an outgrowth of the paranoid Red Scare of the 1950’s.
It is worth reflecting on the nature of that oath, as we consider the events of the last several days. First, as all sitting presidents have done for the last seventy years, Trump spoke at the Boy Scouts of America Jamboree. Rather than follow the tradition of presidents going back to FDR and speak to the assembled young men about community service and civic responsibility, Trump made a rambling, inappropriate, ugly speech. He led the scouts to boo President Obama and held up William Levitt, the developer who mass produced residentially segregated affordable housing in Levittowns throughout the Northeast (look it up) as a role model for the Scouts to emulate. With the moral blindness typical of Trump, he implied that Levitt was admirable because of his wealth, regardless of the source. Truly, there is nothing that this man will not debase.
We have also indulged in schadenfreude as we watched Trump torture Jefferson Beauregard Sessions over Twitter. The irony is that Sessions has most consistently used his position to implement the Trump-Bannon agenda of vicious bigotry as policy. Sessions has used the awesome power of the Justice Department to hunt down undocumented immigrants like prey, fire up the machinery of mass incarceration by seeking draconian drug offense penalties and just yesterday, explicitly reject the premise that Title VII prohibits discrimination against LGBT Americans. Despite this appalling consistency, Trump is excoriating Sessions for insufficient loyalty and trying to torment him into resigning. Sessions is reported to be ticked off and adamant about remaining. Far-right Congressional Republicans are scolding Trump for being “mean” to Sessions. What they all seem to miss is that Trump demands slavish obeisance to Trump, not to a noxious policy agenda. Clearly, Trump feels Mueller closing in and is transparently trying to engineer Sessions’ departure in order to fire Mueller. His endgame is pathetically obvious.
Yesterday, in a move calculated to reassure his bigoted base that hatred would continue unabated regardless of Sessions’ fate, Trump tweeted that transgender Americans could no longer serve in the military. Think about that for a moment. A malignant narcissist who has never served his country in any capacity and is using the highest office in the land to destroy American ideals and enrich himself and his family cavalierly fired off a tweet jeopardizing the careers and status of 15,000 loyal Americans who have taken an oath to risk their lives to uphold our Constitution and defend this country. The thought of it should make us physically sick.
In light of all of this, we must recognize that fealty to the pledge we all took demands that we rid our republic of the scourge of Donald Trump and all who seek to enact his debased, immoral agenda. Now is the time to make good on the promise we recited every day. We pledged our allegiance to “one nation…indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
#Transgendermilitaryban