Recently I read Shiksa by Eva Antwerpen, a memoir of growing up in Nazi Germany. Ms. Antwerpen’s parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they did not believe in saluting the flag, which in their case was the flag with the swastika. As you can imagine, thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses died in concentration camps.
Ms. Antwerpen survived the war, although her father was not so lucky. When I read her book, I thought how terrible it would be to live in a country where one was forced to salute the flag. Then it occurred to me that in the U.S. at that time, children were also required to salute the flag.
In 1935 an 11-year-old student in Minersville, Pennsylvania, Lillian Gobitas, who was also a Jehovah’s Witness, decided that saluting a temporal symbol was idolatry. She refused to do it. She was expelled.
The case reached the Supreme Court in 1940, one year before the U.S. went to war against Nazi Germany. The court ruled 8-1 that schools could require students to salute the flag. While it is true that Ms. Gobitas was not sent to a concentration camp, it remains a blot on American freedom. Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote that “National unity is the basis for national security.” An 11-year-old girl’s refusal to salute the flag evidently would undermine national security.
In 1943 the Court overturned the Gobitis decision in Barnette v. West Virginia. The Court ruled 6-3 that religious freedom was more important than saluting the flag.
Lillian Gobitas died earlier this week. I salute her.
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