Lafayette Parish School Board member Erick Knezek got a gift last week when a humanist legal center sent a letter to Superintendent Donald Aguillard and the principal of Acadiana High urging them to revisit the school system’s policy requiring students to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance — this after an AHS student was allegedly repeatedly harassed and demeaned by a knuckleheaded teacher for refusing to stand and participate in our daily expression of American exceptionalism.

Within a day of the Pledge controversy being reported here and elsewhere, Knezek pounced, posting on his Erick Knezek for Congress Facebook page a link to a petition on his campaign website with the utterly misleading status update, “What is offensive about the Pledge of Allegiance? Liberals want to take it out of our schools. SIGN HERE to stop them!”
See what he did there, leaping from a school system policy review to those evil liberals wanting to remove the Pledge from schools altogether? Knezek soon removed the misleading status update after getting called on it by a handful of people who actually bother to think for themselves, but not before the thread devolved into a stream of typical, trite exclamations of patriotism along the lines of “If you don’t like America then go live in Russia!”

We know how Knezek, halfway through his first term in any elected office and already angling for a bigger fish, will vote when the school board decides whether to honor the First Amendment and end the policy requiring students to stand for the Pledge. It’s a safe assumption a majority of his fellow school board members will cower under the suffocating weight of jingoism — lest they have their patriotism questioned — and join him. The result will be a lawsuit from the Appignani Humanist Legal Center or another civil liberty group — litigation the school system can ill afford to undertake. And it’s a lawsuit the school system will almost certainly lose.

BTW: Credit for the Pledge typically goes to Baptist minister Francis Bellamy, a socialist — a socialist! — who supported separation of church and state and did not include the phrase “under God” in the original version; “under God” was added by Congress on Flag Day in 1954 at the height of the Red Scare — America’s response to those Godless communists in the Soviet Union. That was two years before Congress added "In God We Trust" to U.S. currency for the same reason.