Jaesean Plummer (left), 16, was forced to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance as a Capitol Police officer pulled him to his feet in the Senate gallery during last week’s special session. His mother, Monica Hutchinson, sits to his right.
In 1943, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protects students from being forced to salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance in public school.
“Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters,” Justice Robert Houghwout Jackson wrote in his majority opinion.
“We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority.”
But nowadays, authority directs dissenters to leave the country. A peaceful expression of protest can get you blackballed from your profession. And earlier this month, a 16-year-old visitor at the Virginia State Capitol was physically forced to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance by a Capitol Police officer.
A hate group from North Carolina recently exercised its First Amendment rights at Hanover Courthouse without being accosted by law enforcement. A black teenager from Henrico County should not be handled by police while exercising his.
To coerce an individual into a public expression of patriotism mocks the idea of freedom.
Jaesean Plummer, a junior at Hermitage High, was among the Boys and Girls Club visitors at the Capitol when the pledge was recited. In protest of the dubious assertion that we live in a nation “with and liberty and justice for all,” he chose to sit in protest, as he and his mom, progressive political organizer Monica Hutchinson, had done previously.
Then he felt a tap on his shoulder. A Capitol Police officer told him to get up.
“I said, ‘No, I am choosing to sit.’ So then she grabbed me by my shirt and she pulled me up,” Plummer told Times-Dispatch reporter Graham Moomaw during an interview. Not wanting to cause a scene and ruin the occasion, he stood.
With the help of state Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, Hutchinson and Plummer met with the officer a few days later. The officer apologized and Col. Steve Pike said Capitol Police officers would be instructed that visitors don’t have to stand for the pledge if they don’t want to.
McClellan said in the aftermath that the episode arose partly from a “misunderstanding of intentions,” and that the officer didn’t seem to recognize that Plummer was sitting as a form of protest.
It doesn’t matter why Plummer chose to remain seated, said Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia.
“No person can be compelled to stand for the pledge,” she said in an email. “What if the person was sitting because they were disabled? Tired?”
She cited a section of the Virginia State Code that reads in part, “no student shall be compelled to recite the Pledge if he, his parent or legal guardian objects on religious, philosophical or other grounds to his participating in this exercise.”
“The rules in the legislature should be no different,” Gastañaga said, “especially where there is no requirement/nor could there be regarding the pledge at the start of the legislative session.”
What we’re left with is a sad civics lesson.
“He’s still confused in a sense: confused, hurt, angry — all of the above,” Hutchinson said. She noted the irony that this happened while he was participating in government.
“A Capitol is a place where he should have felt welcome, he should have felt safe. And he didn’t. And it hurt,” Hutchinson said.
Will he keep sitting during the pledge?
“Absolutely,” she said.
Anyone who has a problem with that should sincerely explore why individuals like Plummer, Hutchinson and Colin Kaepernick are protesting. (Hint: It’s not because they hate America or our troops.)
You might also read up on the history of the pledge, which was written by, of all things, a socialist.
Francis Bellamy was an officer in Boston’s Society of Christian Socialists. He was pro-immigration, pro-worker’s rights and pro-economic justice. He’d find rough sledding in the current political environment.
The pledge was published in 1892 as part of a 400th anniversary commemoration of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. This was fewer than three decades after the union was preserved by the Civil War. That “one nation indivisible” line was intentional.
In 1954, America was feeling similarly insecure about its atheist communist adversary, the Soviet Union. One nation “under God” was added to the Pledge.
Today, we’re a starkly divided nation with increasing “love it or leave it” fervor. But Justice Jackson’s opinion cautioned against “compulsory unification of opinion.”
“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein,” he wrote.
Our allegiance needs to be to truth, justice and freedom, or those words in the pledge will ring eternally hollow.
