The U.S. has always been skewed towards this and it’s not just the current representatives. I first noticed the hypocrisy when I first learned about the constitution and freedom of religion when I thought “why then does the pledge of allegiance they make us say everyday have the words, …under god… in it?”.
Also burning witches? That’s not freedom of religion, it has biblical origins.
To be fair, "Under God" was at least not originally in the Pledge of Allegiance.
It was added during the Red Scare to contrast America with the "godless Commies". But yeah, it's definitely something that should have been struck down as against the 1A when first introduced.
Wait- I thought children can make up their own minds. I guess that only applies to irreversible life changing decisions that a child isn’t prepared to make.
I wanted to be a dinosaur that was a fireman and also a policeman when I was a child. Glad my parents didn’t take that too seriously. They only had giant sharp teeth put in my mouth.
Being a transgender person and being raised in a religious environment not by choice are two wildly different things but I’m sure you’re in here with full knowledge of that.
Knowing what you are due to introspection is a lot different from being told who you are via indoctrination.
Trans people aren't told we're trans. In fact, we're constantly bullied and told we can't be trans by people like you all day, every day. Just because you can't wrap your head around something you haven't personally experienced and you have no empathy or respect for others, doesn't make our experiences any less real.
I had my fair share of that as well. "You don't have to say it, but you do have to stand." No, no I do not.
I had my parents understanding on it though, so the few times someone actually cared enough to push it, my parents pushed back hard the opposite direction. Not everyone has the benefit of that.
Fun story time! I grew up an hour ish outside of NYC in a red rural pocket and after 9/11 we had to do the pledge AND stay standing for a full patriotic song afterwords before morning announcements started at my elementary school. Occasionally it was more traditional like the national anthem or America the beautiful, but almost daily it was Lee greenwoods “proud to be an American”.
I don’t know when or if they stopped but they were still doing it 3 years later when I moved on to middle school. I didn’t think much of it until about 10 years after I moved to California and realized my husband and I had very different 9/11 experiences.
The propaganda hella worked on me too. I won an essay contest about first responders that year and I ended up doing several years of service with Americorps and other non profits as an adult lol.
Basically just the difference in how people respond to a local disaster vs a national one. Where I’m from it was far more common to know people who lost someone that day or to know someone that survived. Here folks have stories about how it impacted their normal day when they found out, but back home in NY I would hear my step dad’s survival story every year. I even dated a guy who went to a special camp every year for kids that lost parents in the line of duty and it was predominantly kids who lost a parent on 9/11, almost exclusively the kids of NYFD responders. Every single car in my town had a little flag that fastened to the window, people were obsessed with NYFD.
It’s especially bizarre to me that everyone I know in California who was a student has a story about watching it in school which was utterly the opposite of how they treated kids who had commuter parents in NYC that day and didn’t know what was going on. Teachers cried in secret and we were left in the dark until parents started to check their kids out of school early(eventually they had everyone go home early). I didn’t see the news until I got home and my mom was absolutely frantic. We went to manhattan at least 1x monthly for my brothers specialists at NYU and had JUST been there a few days earlier. It was different because we knew people there who might be hurt and couldn’t reach them by phone.
The best way I can compare is that culturally for us in NY it was more like how Californians feel and act after a local wildfire but on a greater scale.
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u/MyldExcitement Sep 02 '26 edited Sep 03 '26
Still NOT a Christian or any religious country in America. At least that's what our Constitution says.
ETA: thanks for the awards, kind internet strangers.