Judge Steven McAuliffe, a federal judge in New Hampshire and an appointee of President George H. W. Bush, rejected the lawsuit by the infamous atheist, Michael Newdow, who has a maniacal fetish to get rid of the Pledge of Allegiance in all American schools because he is offended by the words in the pledge "Under God" and who wants references to God erased from the public square in America. Incidentally, Judge McAuliffe was the husband of Christa McAuliffe, one of the victims of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
In this particular case, Newdow was trying to get rid of the Pledge of Allegiance in the Hanover, New Hampshire public school system. Judge McAuliffe ruled that school children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance each morning -- as hundreds of millions of American school children have done for decades -- with the words "one Nation under God" does not violate the First Amendment. He said that the pledge is voluntary and is not a prayer.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty represented three families from Hanover, New Hampshire and the Knights of Columbus in the case before the federal judge. Indeed, the Knights of Columbus had spearheaded the national effort some 55 years ago to add "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance.
Atheist Michael Newdow is also an "ordained minister" of something called the "Universal Life Church." He began in 1997 a group called the "First Amendment Church of True Science" which opposes the increasingly discredited lie of "separation of church and state" which the Founding Fathers would scoff at today, including Thomas Jefferson who once used the term in a letter to a Baptist church in Connecticut.
Newdow also lost a lawsuit to stop the invocation prayer at President George W. Bush's second inauguration in January 2005. He has been trying to get rid of "In God We Trust" on our currency and coinage and has been unsuccessful at that.
It is long past time for the United States Congress to pass legislation making these people out on the fringes of American society pay all court costs of both parties for filing nuisance lawsuits which have no chance of succeeding.
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