The Daily Profaner: Putting Snark First, Myths Last!

It’s time for a refreshing glass of inauguration scandal lite - now with less Rick Warren; it’s less filling and better for you! Everyone’s favorite lawsuit atheist, Michael Newdow, is leading a whole gaggle of organizations and individuals in a lawsuit calling for the inaugural prayers and the phrase “so help me god” to be deep sixed from the inauguration.

Nedow filed a virtually identical lawsuit in 2005 that was kicked the hell out of the courts. The problem is that the inauguration is a privately-funded event, not a branch of the government that can violate the establishment clause. Also, “so help me god” isn’t part of the legal oath, it’s just a tradition - one you aren’t obliged to follow, at all.

Newdow points out that “so help me god” isn’t a long standing and universal tradition, citing that Herbert Hoover didn’t say it during his inauguration. This was a bad example; instead of going for a president whose name is synonymous with”epic fail”, he should have gone with republican standby Teddy Roosevelt, who said, “and thus I swear.” Of course it totally doesn’t matter either way because the President-elect is not required by law to say anything after the oath.

You have to ask, if Newdow is claiming that it’s a sporadically followed tradition and not the law, what the hell is he suing about? How can a phrase with no legal sanction and uttered sporadically by private citizens as they become President be a violation of the First Amendment? It can’t - which is why the lawsuit got thrown out last time. We could just call it a symbolic lawsuit; it’s plenty symbolic of the fact that some people don’t read the damn law.

IF you want to do something REAL to help change the inauguration you can contact President-elect Obama here to demand that he sack Rick “bigot” Warren from his inauguration.

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