-By Warner Todd Huston
Last week a dust up between Seattle Pacific University and a veterans group was kicked up when the university informed the group that they would not be allowed to say the Pledge of Allegiance and present the colors during their veteran’s day ceremony.
A group called the Military and Veteran Support Club at SPU had scheduled a ceremony to be held in the university’s chapel for the upcoming Veterans Day holiday. The group intended to perform the Pledge of Allegiance and wanted to present the colors during the ceremony. But the plans were nixed by the university because they were deemed too “controversial.”
As the veteran group noted on its Facebook page, “This integral part of veteran support was deemed controversial due to the fact that it may make some individuals “uncomfortable”. It is important to note that University Ministries initially approved the pledge and the presentation of colors, but then rescinded approval of this portion of the service.”
But the University told Fox 13, “The organizers decided not to include the pledge of allegiance and the presentation of colors during the November 10 chapel, given that there are diversity of views on campus whether such elements should be part of a Christian worship service.”
The sudden removal of the Pledge and the flag ceremony, though, didn’t sit well with Daniel Fenlason, an organizer of Students for Military Veterans Support club, who said, “We should be able to pledge allegiance to the flag inside of our own church, in our own house of worship [for] the same people who died for that same right.”
School officials were sure that by eliminating the Pledge and the flags they were acting in the best interests of students that dislike the American flag, the Pledge of allegiance, and our soldiers.
Finally, after the standoff between the school and the group made it into the media, the school reversed course and relented.
Ultimately the group’s Facebook page announced on November 6 that school administrators had changed their minds saying, “Students will now have the opportunity to say the pledge of allegiance and honor the veterans with the presentation of the colors at a pre-chapel ceremony.”
But let’s remember how this began. It began because the school’s first thought was that displaying the flag, saying the Pledge and honoring our veterans would somehow “upset” students and that because of this it should be quashed.
What we see here once again is that our system of higher learning is infested with people that hate our country.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Wizbang.com, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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