"In its 2-1 decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a 1954 act of Congress that inserted the phrase "under God" after the phrase "one nation" in the pledge."
If this could hold on a federal level, the US would look a lot more like a civilized (i.e. secular, in my agnostic point of view), place.
Update: Eugene Volokh has a wholla lotta comments.
06/28/02 update: JD Lasica, after an e-mail I sent him, has more. I guess all these religious references in American public life are just unfathomable to us Euros. Update: I told JD that my point of view might be more strictly French than European at large. This Kuro5hin thread has posts from England, Luxembourg, Belgium and Finland. It seems I’m not the only one to see the USA are flirting with theocracy, though separation of church and state isn’t uniformly applied across the continent. I mean, I can’t imagine anyone this side of the pond saying: "we need common-sense judges who understand that our rights were derived from God." This thread, by the way, highlights the supreme degree of dignified stupidity (or is it hypocrisy elevated to art form?) displayed by some Republican politicians.