SAN FRANCISCO, March 1: A US appeals court on Friday upheld its controversial ruling that a patriotic oath recited by generations of American school children is unconstitutional because it invokes the name of God.

The Ninth Circuit court of appeals rejected a bid by the government of President George W. Bush to overturn its decision on the oath, known as “the pledge of allegiance,” setting the scene for a high-profile Supreme Court showdown.

The court said that reciting the pledge in schools placed “students in the untenable position of choosing between participating in an exercise with religious content or protesting.”

The San Francisco-based judges ruled in June last year that the pledge, recited daily by millions of students across the United States, violated the constitutional principle of the separation of church and state by including the phrase “under God”.

The federal court said the phrase “one nation under God” in the pledge represented a government endorsement of religion forbidden by the US constitution.

Widely considered the most liberal appeals court in the United States, the Ninth Circuit interprets law for California and eight other states.

The decision declaring the 110-year-old pledge unconstitutional triggered violent condemnation across the United States, where the ambiguous relationship between church and state is a longstanding source of controversy.

Bush — who is deeply religious and almost daily invokes God’s name in speeches — and Congress dismissed the original decision as “ridiculous” and his administration appealed the decision last August.

The White House had asked the Ninth Circuit to invoke its “en banc” procedure to reconsider the ruling with an 11-judge panel, which would have required the vote of a majority of the court’s 24 full-time judges. However, 14 judges voted against rehearing the matter.

However, while upholding last year’s 2-1 ruling, the court did amend its earlier decision slightly to reflect that it would apply only to public schools where pupils may feel coerced into reciting “under God”.

Washington’s top prosecutor — Attorney General John Ashcroft — vowed Friday that the federal bureaucracy he oversees, the US Justice Department, would fight to overturn the ruling.

“The Justice Department will spare no effort to preserve the rights of all our citizens to pledge allegiance to the American flag,” Ashcroft said.

“We will defend the ability of Americans to declare their patriotism through the time-honored tradition of voluntarily reciting the pledge,” he said.

The case could now be taken by the US Supreme Court in Washington. If the ruling is not overturned, it would apply to around 9.6 million public school pupils in the nine western US states under the court’s jurisdiction.

The case was brought by an atheist who objected to his daughter being made to recite the pledge — along with millions of other scholars across the country — at her school near the California state capital of Sacramento.

Doctor Michael Newdow said the pledge — which was amended to include the phrase “under God” in 1954 — violated the constitutional right of his eight-year-old daughter to receive a state education free of religion.

The pledge is voluntarily chanted by millions of US elementary school pupils between the ages of five and 11 each day as they stand before the US flag and clutch their hearts with their right hands.

It was composed in 1892 by Baptist minister Francis Bellamy for the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America and the phrase “under God” was inserted by act of Congress at the height of the Cold War.

The separation of church and state has long been at issue in the deeply religious — and patriotic — America where moves to ban prayers in state schools have often caused outrage.

But while the US administration was certain to react angrily to the court’s decision to thwart its appeal, atheists hailed the ruling.

The panel took “clear and principled stand on behalf of the separation of church and state, and civil rights for Atheists and other non-believers,” said Ellen Johnson, President of American Atheists.

The group’s spokesman Ron Barrier said the pledge should be “free of religious proselytizing and endorsement” — as it was originally meant to be.

“The original pledge didn’t mention a deity, and government has no business telling anyone, including youngsters, that their patriotism is somehow tied to public professions of religious belief,” he said.—AFP