It’s always good to get a broader perspective on current issues, such as the controversy over those “taking a knee” during the national anthem before athletic events.

This is not the first time similar debates have raged. In early 1942, just a month after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. was suddenly at war in Europe and the Pacific. And a patriotic fervor was understandably spreading.

In West Virginia, the state Board of Education adopted a policy requiring all students and teachers to participate in saluting the flag and repeating the pledge of allegiance.

Failure to participate was to be considered “insubordination” and cause for expulsion from school. And because school attendance was mandatory, students who were expelled for refusing to salute the flag were considered “unlawfully absent” and considered delinquents, opening their parents or guardians to potential prosecution for contributing to their delinquency.

A legal challenge was filed by a Jehovah’s Witness family, who said their religion taught that God’s laws are superior to those of government, and that they could not salute the flag without violating their religious beliefs.

The case came to the U.S. Supreme Court for a hearing in March 1943, and the court’s decision came down on June 14, 1943.

Remember the context. Global war was raging on two fronts. Food was being rationed at home, and soldiers from every state in the country were being sent into battle.

A courageous Supreme Court decided that compulsory participation in saluting the flag and pledging allegiance are contrary to the Constitution and undermines our political freedoms and heritage. And while the case was initiated by a family due to their religious beliefs, the court held that compulsion in this sphere is wrong not just where it confronts religious freedoms, but in all areas of our First Amendment rights.

The court’s decision explains why attempting to compell conformity, even in saluting the flag or nation for which it stands, is unwise and self-defeating as a policy, and unconstitutional when done using the power of the state.

The decision, and other key background on the case, can be found here.

Here’s the decision’s key paragraph:

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. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.

The justices recognized that attempts by authoritarian regimes to impose national unity of thought have necessarily failed. And the First Amendment is meant to protect us from going down such a path by protecting independent thought and belief in small things as well as in major things.

I love the sentence: “…the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.”

If we could err on the side of freedom of thought and expression in the midst of WWII, we should certainly be able to do so today when confronted with those who “take a knee” in order to make the point that despite our aspirations, we are not yet a nation “with liberty and justice for all.”

Here’s a longer excerpt from the majority’s decision. I hope some of you will read on.

As governmental pressure toward unity becomes greater, so strife becomes more bitter as to whose unity it shall be. Probably no deeper division of our people could proceed from any provocation than from finding it necessary to choose what doctrine and whose program public educational officials shall compel youth to unite in embracing. Ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of its pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies. Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

It seems trite but necessary to say that the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings. There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority. 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.

The case is made difficult not because the principles of its decision are obscure, but because the flag involved is our own. Nevertheless, we apply the limitations of the Constitution with no fear that freedom to be intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary will disintegrate the social organization. To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous, instead of a compulsory routine, is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.

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. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.

And there’s more in a concurring opinion written by Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas.

Words uttered under coercion are proof of loyalty to nothing but self-interest. Love of country must spring from willing hearts and free minds, inspired by a fair administration of wise laws enacted by the people’s elected representatives within the bounds of express constitutional prohibitions. These laws must, to be consistent with the First Amendment, permit the widest toleration of conflicting viewpoints consistent with a society of free men.

Neither our domestic tranquillity in peace nor our martial effort in war depend on compelling little children to participate in a ceremony which ends in nothing for them but a fear of spiritual condemnation. If, as we think, their fears are groundless, time and reason are the proper antidotes for their errors. The ceremonial, when enforced against conscientious objectors, more likely to defeat than to serve its high purpose, is a handy implement for disguised religious persecution. As such, it is inconsistent with our Constitution’s plan and purpose.

And, in today’s context, “a handy implement for disguised racial injustice,” I would say.

This from a second concurring opinion by Justice William Francis “Frank” Murphy.

I am unable to agree that the benefits that may accrue to society from the compulsory flag salute are sufficiently definite and tangible to justify the invasion of freedom and privacy that is entailed or to compensate for a restraint on the freedom of the individual to be vocal or silent according to his conscience or personal inclination. The trenchant words in the preamble to the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom remain unanswerable:

“. . . all attempts to influence [the mind] by temporal punishments, or burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, . . .”

Any spark of love for country which may be generated in a child or his associates by forcing him to make what is to him an empty gesture and recite words wrung from him contrary to his religious beliefs is overshadowed by the desirability of preserving freedom of conscience to the full. It is in that freedom and the example of persuasion, not in force and compulsion, that the real unity of America lies.