Supreme Court punts on reviewing Fla. student's challenge of state's mandatory pledge of allegiance law

The truism that cases the Supreme Court refuses to hear are often more important than ones it decides on is proven again, as the Supreme refuses to engage the question of whether students in public schools have a First Amendment right to refuse to stand and repeat the Pledge of Allegiance.

The Christian Science Monitor reports

A Florida teenager has lost his bid to have the US Supreme Court decide whether students in public schools have a First Amendment right to refuse to stand and repeat the Pledge of Allegiance.

The underlying lawsuit did not challenge the content of the Pledge. Instead, at issue was a Florida law that requires all public-school students, Grades K-12, to stand and repeat the Pledge, unless excused in writing by a parent.

The law was passed in 1942 and had apparently gone unchallenged until December 2005. That's when Cameron Frazier, a junior, arrived for his fourth-period math class at Boynton Beach High School and informed the teacher that as a matter of conscience, he would neither stand nor recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

"You clearly have no respect. You are so ungrateful and so un-American," the math teacher told Cameron in front of the class. "Do you know what's out there fighting our war? That flag you refuse to show respect to."

Cameron stood his ground. "No," he said. "Our soldiers are out fighting a war. The flag is an inanimate piece of cloth that doesn't move and surely can't hold a gun."

On Monday, the Supreme Court announced that it would not hear the case. No reason for the decision was offered.

In seeking high-court review of the case, called Frazier v. Smith, Mr. Frazier's lawyers had asked the justices to decide whether he and other students have a constitutional right to refuse to be compelled by the government to repeat the Pledge of Allegiance.

To resolve the case, the justices would have had to clarify a landmark 1943 ruling in which the high court declared schoolchildren in West Virginia may not be required to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance.

The issue in the Frazier case was whether the First Amendment right established in the West Virginia decision belongs to the children alone or instead extends to the children through their parents.

A federal judge in Florida agreed that the right belongs to the students and struck down the Florida law. But a federal appeals-court panel later upheld the law on grounds that the First Amendment right belongs to parents of school-age children - not the children themselves.