I don’t know the source of this first essay, just that it was an email making the rounds, and as the last line states “if you agree, pass this onto other Americans; It is time to take a stand.”]

Broken Arrow, Oklahoma School officials remove “God Bless America” signs from schools in fear that someone might be offended. Channel 12 News in Long Island, New York, orders flags removed from the newsroom and red, white, and blue ribbons removed from the lapels of reporters. Why? Management did not want to appear biased and felt that our nations flag might give the appearance that “they lean one way or another.” Berkeley, California bans U. S. Flags from being displayed on city fire trucks because they didn’t want to offend anyone in the community.
In an “act of tolerance” the head of the public library at Florida Gulf Coast University ordered all “Proud to be an American” signs removed so as to not offend international students.
I, for one, am quite disturbed by these actions of so-called American citizens; and I am tired of this nation worrying about whether or not we are offending some individual or their culture. Since the terrorist attracts on September 11, we have experienced a surge in patriotism by the majority of Americans. However, the dust from the attacks had barely settled in New York and Washington D. C. when the “politically correct” crowd began complaining about the possibility that our patriotism was offending others.
I am not against immigration, nor do I hold a grudge against anyone who is seeking a better life by coming to America. In fact, our country’s population is almost entirely comprised of descendants of immigrants; however, there are a few things that those who have recently come to our country, and apparently some Native Americans, need to understand.
Fist of all, it is not our responsibility to continually try not to offend you in any way. This idea of America being a multi-cultural community has served only to dilute our sovereignty and our national identity. As Americans, we have our own culture, our own society, our own language, and our own lifestyle. This culture, called the “American Way” has been developed over centuries of struggles, trials, and victories by millions of men and women who have sought freedom, our forefathers fought, bled, and died at places such as Bunker Hill, Antietam, San Juan, Iwo Jim, Normandy, Korea,
Vietnam.
We speak English, not Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, or any other language!
“In God We Trust” is our national motto. This is not some off-the-wall, Christian Right Wing, political slogan; it is our national motto. It is engraved in stone in the House of Representatives at our Capitol and it is printed on our currency. We adopted this motto because Christian men and women, on Christian principles, founded this nation; and this is clearly documented throughout our history. If it is appropriate for our motto to be inscribed in the halls of our highest level of Government, then it is certainly appropriate to display it on the walls of our schools.
God is in our pledge, our National Anthem, nearly every patriotic song, and in our founding documents. We honor His birth, death and resurrection as holidays, and we turn to Him in prayer in times of crisis.
If God offends you, then I suggest you consider another part of the world as your new home, because God is part of our culture and we are proud to have Him.
We are proud of our heritage and those who have so honorably defended our freedoms. We celebrate Independence Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and Flag Day. We have parades, picnics, and barbecues where we proudly wave our flag.
As an American, I have the right to wave my flag, sing my national anthem, quote my national motto, and cite my pledge whenever and wherever I choose.
If the Stars and Stripes offend you, or you don’t like Uncle Sam, then you should seriously consider a move to another part of this planet. The American culture is our way of life, our heritage, and we are proud of it. We are happy with our culture and have no desire to change, and we really don’t care how you did things where you came from, if it was so superior, go home.
We are Americans, like it or not, this is our country, our land, and our lifestyle.
Our First Amendment gives every citizen the right to express his opinion about our government, culture, or society, and we will allow you every opportunity to do so.
But once you are done complaining, whining and griping about our flag, our pledge, our national motto our way of life, I highly encourage you take advantage of one other great American freedom the right to leave.
If you agree, pass this onto other Americans; It is time to take a stand.
MAY GOD BLESS AMERICA
LAND THAT WE LOVE

[This response is from a retired United States Marine major decorated for his service to our country in Viet Nam. I have lightly edited the contents removing a few names and places but I believe it is true to the original. He received a copy of the above in an email]

I don’t often get set off, but I was just in the mood that that one caught me. A very, very tiny little bit of self-righteousness goes a really long way with me.
On a personal note, my best friend was raised a Buddhist in Japan and brought to this country through his mother marrying into the military. He was still a registered alien when he was drafted (yes, non-citizens are subject to conscription – forced service – and dying for “not their country” – so sorry, you just happened to be here and we could use you.), came into the Marines with me, was hit in the thumb, eye, and other places by shrapnel from a grenade and mortar near Khe Sanh in Vietnam in April of 1967, medevacced out to the hospital ship, further evacced to the Naval Hospital for surgery to save his eye. During a leave from Viet Nam I visited him in San Francisco Bay where they held him for 6 months for recuperation. Once fit, he was an instructor at the infantry training school at Camp Pendleton until his discharge, whereupon he has earned a civil engineering degree and a law degree, also seeking and getting his citizenship along the way from that is willing to speed up the process for those who’ve risked their lives and shed their blood for the privilege, and I doubt there are any who realize intimately just what a privilege it is, than those who have earned it in this fashion – seen scrawled on lots of flak jackets in Viet Nam, “For those who fight for it, freedom has a flavor the protected never know.” Now I don’t feel like I do just because of my friend – I know there are other stories of other people to illustrate this same point, but I happen to know him best, which makes it personal.
So when I hear some self righteous clown claim that we have a Christian government to serve a citizenry made up of may faiths, the citizens of all other faiths must be required to use government money recognizing the Christian god, they must all pledge allegiance to a flag subordinate to the Christian god, listen to lectures in government schools paid for by all the citizenry which claim the “begats” in Christian literature prove the earth is only 5,000 years old, students of all faiths should stand and acknowledge Christian prayers blared out over public address systems in classrooms or at government school sporting events, lawyers and defendants of contrary religious faiths should face accusations and risk their lives, liberty and property facing judges in government courtrooms with Christian Commandments posted behind the bench, and hear that anyone who speaks of seeing any hypocrisy or conflict of interest in this mixing of government and religion, especially the Christian religion, should just get the hell out, I get just a little perturbed.
The part of the First Amendment that refers to “shall not prohibit the free exercise thereof” say each person of whatever faith, EVEN the Christians, can pray in schools – over their test, in the hallways, over their textbooks, out on the lawn, during assemblies – in any way at all the doesn’t interfere with the ability of their fellow students to get educated. They can pray while they spend money, when they’re in court, while they’re pledging their life and service to the continued existence of this form of government. While doing all those things – but not to the point of interfering with the efforts of their fellow citizens to pursue the same activities. I know of no members of any religious belief (except those killing, or exposing their children to death) whose personal choice of practices is interfered with.

In addition, the part that says, “shall recognize no establishment of religion” OUGHT to have prevented every single government agency from using its power to coerce, influence, legitimize, support, or defend any particular belief system. Throughout the history of our current form of government, I know of no effort by the Jews, Muslims, Bahaii, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucist, Animist, Wiccan, Satanic, Zoroastern, Heathen, Pagan or Idolaters to actively seek to have the government use its coercive power to cause the citizens of a differing belief to stand, stop or pledge in recognition of the rightness of that particular for of belief in a higher supernatural power – only the Christian have done this; repeatedly, relentlessly, obsessively. They can’t be satisfied with practicing their faith in our society in all the other avenues left open to them, save only the government, which our Founders had the wisdom to exempt. They are rabid about cloaking themselves in public, government approval and turning all the various government tentacles into the means of legitimacy and coercion for themselves.
Subscribing wholeheartedly as I do to the philosophy embodied in the two previous paragraphs, and having both traveled about much of the world and also continually observed the rest of it through media, I have no fear or anxiety with regard to any of the people who hold all the polyglot of beliefs I listed above, who have chose to surrender everything and risk greatly to live in this country and share in the liberty promised to those committing themselves to our form of government. I do, however, fear and dread the perpetual actions of the Christians to turn our government into a tool for their own use. So, in the ultimate bit of irony, and in the spirit of Catch-22, I can only sum all this up by praying myself: “God! Save us from the good, self-righteous Christians”

[The author of this reply makes a few additional points in the following:]

The author [referring to the original essay] states that, “In God We Trust” is our national motto. This is not some off-the wall, Christian Right Wing, political slogan; It is our national motto.”
Sorry, but despite the fervent wish of the Christian Right Win, our Nation Motto is “E Pluribus Unum”, not “In God We Trust” but like Bluto (John Belushi) in Animal House, I thought: “Don’t stop him, he’s on a roll!”
In God We Trust didn’t exist for the first 74 years of our country – only be added to our coinage by the Secretary of the Treasury with approval of then President Abraham Lincoln) at the urging of a lady citizen who had written to him in 1862 out of concern that the Civil War had gone so badly up until then, and the outcome was in such great doubt (a view widely held by many throughout the Union toward a conflict confidently expected to be settled with 90 days and now out of control for over a year, with no end in sight) because we were two Christian nations at war each certain as to the righteousness of their cause, and we (the Union) had to persuade God to get on our side. She proposed we do this by putting the phrase In God We Trust on our currency. Lincoln was desperate and figured it couldn’t hurt. [The phrase wasn’t added to our paper money until 1957]
It isn’t on our currency because the Founding Fathers did anything of the kind. They could have done something like this when we first formed, but you’ll notice they specifically chose not to. This was primarily because nearly every single colony had a different (and nearly always antagonistic) religious belief from all the others – and each had, to varying degrees, been motivated by the opportunity to escape systems of government which, for the entirety of human history, had used their authority to tax, conscript, regulate commerce, imprison and execute: all in support of the locally favored religious belief. Such a step as proclaiming our allegiance to a particular deity at our country’s founding was not possible because of the revulsion held toward the death and destruction experienced nearly nonstop across all of Europe for the preceding several hundred years. This conflagration was the direct result of competing “Christian” religious beliefs (righteous Catholics killing good Heugonauts slaughtering devout Lutherans attacking righteous Catholics on the Continent; with righteous Catholics in England and Ireland killing good Anglicans in England while those good Anglicans slaughtered the devout Presbyterians of Scotland who massacred the righteous Catholics who attacked from Wales and Ireland out on the British Isles, ad infinitum and every bit of it driven by Divine Right monarchs allied, and constantly changing alliances with, groups of people supporting competing and antagonistic Christian beliefs). Religiously, our colonies were nothing like warm, fuzzy friends; they unite ONLY against a common enemy.
This reality is continually and conveniently forgotten by writers of today, who bask in the passivity of modern religious competition – muzzled and virtually confined to the printed page, as opposed to the blood-filled gutters and severed-heads-on-spikes lined roads of days not long gone by throughout Christendom. Instead the step of using this phrase grew out of the desperation of the Civil War, and afterwards remained, because like most of the things given birth during that period, it stood as another symbol of the Victory of the North over the South – “We had the true Christian God on our side, Yawls Christian God was false.”
Today’s proponents (mostly Christians – since the phrase implies belief in only one god, and one god in particular: the Christian one) have conveniently revised history to give themselves a warm fuzzy, but use it mostly to smite those whose life experiences have convinced them of the truth of a different belief system – and, in my view: all toward creating the reassurance of an “us”, in the face of the dreaded “them”.

But hey, except for that little historical revision, which the mainstream media and our school system continue to allow to sprout like a week in the Garden of Knowledge, it was a real motivator.
The writer also says, “God is in our pledge”, and of course while it is it was only added to the original Pledge (which had already served our Nation well for decades) by the Christian Right Win at the height of the Red Scares in the Fifties. It was there so we could tell who were the traitors among us by watching our friends, relatives, and neighbors closely as they stood to give the Pledge, because the Godless Communists would give themselves away by not saying the words. After all, a similar means had worked really well for the good Christians in Salem and the good Christians in Spain, when they both had encountered a similar problem in sorting out the True Believers from the Great Pretenders just a couple of years before. After all, why have to come up with something new when you have a tried and true good Christian tradition to fall back on? But that’s’ another story.

[So to those flag wavers who are tired of my complaining my whining and griping about our way of life. I say take advantage of one other great American freedom; express your views at the polls. Embrace the diversity you have nothing to fear. Don’t leave America but help us make it a better more tolerant place where we can all realize our dreams.]