High School Student Battles Atheists
By Joseph DeCaro, Worthy News Correspondent
TRENTON (Worthy News)– A high school student in New Jersey is going to court to defend her right to publicly recite the Pledge of Allegiance with the phrase “one nation under God.”
According to Charisma News, Samantha Jones and her family filed a response to a lawsuit from an atheist group that wants to prevent public school students from reciting the entire pledge.
“When I stand up, put my hand over my heart and say the Pledge of Allegiance, I am recognizing that my rights come from God, not from the government,” said Jones, a senior at Highland Regional High School. “If anyone wants to remain silent, that is their right. But it is not their right to silence me.”
This is the second time that the atheists of the American Humanist Association have sued at the state level. Their first lawsuit was unanimously rejected by Massachusetts’ highest court earlier this year.
“The pledge is not a religious creed or a prayer,” said Kristina Arriaga, executive director of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is legally representing Jones. “It is a statement of our nation’s political philosophy that rights come not from the state but from something higher—as our Declaration of Independence puts it, ‘Nature’s God. We are confident that the court will uphold the right to say the pledge in its entirety.”
The courts have already ruled that the Pledge is a voluntary patriotic exercise that teaches American history and civics and that no schoolchild is required to recite the it.
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