Heidi Wegleitner is a member of the Dane County Board of Supervisors in Madison, Wisc., but her vision and the breadth of her spirit go far beyond that narrow realm, reaching the great and widening divide in American politics today: the Wisconsin State Journal reported Tuesday that Wegleitner “is pushing to remove the Pledge of Allegiance from the County Board’s agenda, arguing it’s an inappropriate opening to public meetings.”
Wait, what? The Pledge of Allegiance is an inappropriate opening to public meetings? Is Dane County no longer part of the United States? Wegleitner’s proposal itself demonstrates that in many important ways it isn’t, for she is doubtless not alone in having other allegiances and quite different priorities. Wegneitner is calling for “the removal of a pre-meeting pledge as well as the word ‘prayer’ from the board’s rules, which are undergoing a biannual redraft.” Nor has she been laughed out of the room: “The board’s executive committee is set to consider Wegleitner’s proposals at a meeting on Thursday, although the final say would rest with newly elected supervisors after the April 5 election.”
Why is Wegleitner trying to get the Pledge removed? “It just doesn’t feel like it’s appropriate for us to be doing,” she explains, “when in a pluralistic society we want to be inclusive and representative. At the end of the day, I think it’s divisive.”
Ah, of course. Above all, we must be “inclusive,” and not just of all races and creeds, which everyone takes for granted as axiomatic, but apparently also of those whose allegiance lies with, say, Russia or China, or the Islamic Republic of Iran. How can we be truly “inclusive” if America is not uncritically welcoming of traitors, saboteurs, and others whose delicate consciences would be troubled by being asked to say the Pledge?
To her credit, Wegleitner has done research on this matter: she has “looked into which local governmental bodies recite the pledge at the start of meetings,” and while she “expected smaller, more conservative parts of the county to stand and recite the pledge,” — oh, those racist, divisive, benighted MAGA-hatted fools! — she discovered that “there isn’t any consistency to what governments have the item on their agendas. Municipalities that don’t have the pledge on their agendas include Madison and Waunakee, she said. Other municipalities, such as Fitchburg, Sun Prairie and Verona, do include it, according to those cities’ agendas.”
Related: Basheer Jones Hates America. He Wants to Be Mayor of Cleveland.
Wegleitner’s agenda, which she wants to foist onto the Dane County Board of Supervisors, apparently includes an explicit rejection of the values enshrined in the Pledge. She “likened opposition to saying the pledge to professional athletes who take a knee in support of racial justice movements when the national anthem is played at sporting events.” Yeah, that’s just the problem. But she insists that “there’s other ways to show community and shared values,” and there certainly are. Everyone could, for example, pledge allegiance to the gay flag, after the manner of Chasten Buttigieg. Or the members of the Board of Supervisors could all participate in a march for abortion rights, transgender rights, or the right of first-graders to be exposed to sex talk from perversion advocates. That sort of thing is what Wegleitner no doubt thinks of as “inclusive,” not all the Pledge’s “divisive” talk about national unity, God, and liberty and justice for all.
In its story about Wegleitner’s proposal, the Wisconsin State Journal observed that “with more left-leaning candidates running unopposed throughout the county, the new board could be the most progressive on record.” In reality, however, although this term is commonly used by virtually everyone and taken for granted as referring to the far Left, there is nothing actually progressive about what Wegleitner is proposing, or about the Leftist agenda in general.
The rejection of God is as old as the human race itself, as the Judeo-Christian tradition (and others) tell us; the rejection of national unity and the idea of one law for all people (“liberty and justice for all”) is ancient as well. Advocates of the destruction of the U.S. as “one nation” go back to before the Civil War, and the idea of one legal standard being applied to all people cuts against the Left’s vision of a privileged elite ruling over the rest of us and not being subject to the rules we must follow (think Jussie Smollett recently walking out of prison). That idea, too, is far older than the United States itself. Leftists call themselves “progressives” because they accept the Marxist vision of history as a tremendous progression toward their ultimate victory, which is inevitable. But there is actually nothing inevitable about their victory, and every time they do accomplish something, it represents a regression from the principle of individual rights and freedoms and no progression at all.
Heidi Wegleitner’s proposal should be rejected, but of course, many of her fellow supervisors consider themselves to be as “progressive” as she prides herself on being and will thus strike a blow toward regressing us to the dark days of national disunity and division. Whether her proposal succeeds or fails, however, “progressives” will continue to try to destroy America as a united and free republic. Their agenda is, in the final analysis, just the opposite of inclusive.
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