Remembering the Brave Young Woman Who Refused to Say the Pledge of Allegiance Nearly 80 Years Ago

[rug]

William (left) and Lillian (right) with father Walter Gobitas (via Jehovah’s Witnesses)

September 8, 2014
by Hemant Mehta

Usually, when I mention Jehovah’s Witnesses on this site, it’s not for a good reason. But we owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude.

In 1935, fifth-grader William Gobitas refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance because treating the flag like an idol went against his family’s JW faith. His 12-year-old sister Lillian did the same thing the next day.

They were both expelled from the Minersville School District in Pennsylvania quickly after that. Their parents were forced to pay for a private school, and that was the beginning of a lawsuit that went all the way up to the Supreme Court.

In 1940, in Minersville School District v. Gobitis, the Court ruled 8-1… in favor of the school district. Seriously. They said it wasn’t a violation of religious freedom to compel students to say the Pledge. It was such an awful decision, the Court (with a different makeup) reversed itself three years later in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/09/08/remembering-the-brave-young-woman-who-refused-to-say-the-pledge-of-allegiance-nearly-80-years-ago/



http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=310&invol=586

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=319&page=624

[rurallib]

1. always happy to give a rec for those who stand up for what is right.

[Schema Thing]

2. As someone raised as a Jehovah's Witness

I can tell you that the pressure from the group was much greater than the pressure from society at large. There is a big gun to your head when you "stand up for what is right" as a JW. Is that bravery? I don't know. I certainly hated not saluting, but I also totally believed what I'd been fed from birth about it being "an act of worship to something other than Jehovah".

I now see myself as "the last person in the world who would knowingly choose to be a Jehovah's Witness", and yet there I was until I was 36 - so large was the caliber of that gun, and so deadly it's aim, and so many I'd seen felled by it. The bravest thing I've ever done was leave that religion - at great cost.


For what it's worth, I do believe no one should be forced or even coerced to salute the flag - just as I believe JW's should not be coerced not to salute the flag.

[cbayer]

3. It is not often that one hears a story like yours.

Thanks for sharing it and the perspective that what these kids did may not have been acts of bravery but of coercion.

[Andy823]

4. I agree

I was not born a JW, but became one back in 1990. While studying with them I felt the had answers I was searching for. 5 years earlier I had decided that drugs and alcohol were a problem with me, and I became clean and sober. Everyone seemed so friendly, and I failed to really check them out before I baptized. I had no internet at the time, which would have helped be discover the truth before I was baptized. Once I was baptized the all seemed to change. I met my wife in the organization, and we had two children. It was after my first child that things started to change for me. She needed surgeries, almost a dozen over the years, and although it was very unlikely she would need a transfusion, I decided that if she did no elder was going to tell me "not" to allow her to have one.

Over the next few years I started to see just how much the children suffered because of the mandatory rules set out by the society, and the hypocrisy of the society, and the elders in my congregation led to both my wife and I leaving. It was not easy with the shunning, but we left in 1996 and I have never regretted it one bit. My children meant more to me than pleasing the men in New York, or the congregation, that wanted to control our lives.

I know believe that a persons faith, or lack of faith, is their choice and that no person should put demands on that choice. I know what you went though and how hard it must have been for you to leave. The shunning we experience was in no way "love", nor was it something that God "demanded" to be done to those who left.