No, not the watermelon-smashing dude...Maggie Gallagher, on how the Pledge ruling is important because it demonstrates that our rights come from a supreme spirit:

Where do human rights come from? Why does this country exist? America came into being because more than 200 years ago, a group of men wagered their lives -- and ours -- on the existence of a law higher than the written law, those laws duly passed by parliament and the king stripping Americans of their rights to self-governance. "Under God" serves as a reminder that in pledging allegiance to the United States, we are not asking our citizens to surrender their allegiance to an even higher authority.

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Even a great liberal like Justice William O. Douglas knew that, as he wrote in the 1952 decision Zorach v. Clauson, American "institutions presuppose a Supreme Being," because they presuppose the existence of a source of rights that is separate from and prior to the state.

Well then...I've got a question for Ms. Gallagher: What took so friggin' long?

If our current values, democracy, and human rights are a natural outgrowth of god, then why is the vast majority of human history marked by the absence of those values?